I thought it was fascinating, if at times unsettling viewing. I remember the original doc (from about 2001 I think?) and thought that Louis got some very interesting stuff at the time; he obviously suspected that Savile was a bad 'un and came very close to the truth, although never really getting anything concrete. He obviously found Savile a fascinating character as they stayed in touch for years afterwards, but seemed - in last night's follow-up - to be overly blaming himself for not spotting what now seems obvious (on reviewing clips from the original documentary). I thought he was being very hard on himself; Savile was a very slippery character, not to mention notoriously litigious. An interesting fact that emerged was that in the original documentary, Louis got one definite thing out of Savile - an admission (more of a boast) - of having sex with a 15-year old girl, which he reported to the BBC producers, but it was suppressed and no action was taken.
The weird thing is, well before the original film, I always thought that it was quite well-known that Savile was not only a prolific child molester, rapist and necrophiliac. When I was a student in Dundee in the early 1990s, Jerry Sadowitz had a show on BBC Scotland (as far as I know, it didn't run in England) and he regularly made jokes about Savile's necrophiliac tendencies. I remember one particular rant where he basically described not only Savile's unusual "tastes", but also how he was able to get away with it by threatening any would-be whistleblowers through various means: actual physical threats, litigation at any hint of impropriety, threatening to stop his charity work and his trump card, saying that if anyone reported him, he would simply name other far more high-profile names who shared his peculiar tastes. And of course, it turned out that Sadowitz was spot-on with everything he said, which is probably why he was never sued. However, this was Jerry Sadowitz and his jokes were dismissed as his usual brand of shock humour, so never taken seriously (there's a parallel here with similar allegations John Lydon regularly made in the late 1970s; he was Johnny Rotten and just trying to shock, or so people thought (or appeared to think). But even at the time, my mates and I were all of the opinion that Savile was a horrific creep and certainly guilty of everything Sadowitz and Lydon said.
Another story I remember from around that time was one my dad told; in the early 1970s he worked as a doctor at Leeds Royal Infirmary and said that Savile would regularly turn up as a volunteer porter (basically wheeling patients around on trolleys, including - and especially - corpses to the mortuary). He (my dad) said that it was pretty well-known that Savile wasn't doing this for purely altruistic and charitable reasons, but nobody could ever actually get conclusive proof of his wrongdoings, or catch him "in the act", as it were. But all the young nurses working there at the time were warned never to allow themselves to get into a situation where they were alone with him.
A lot has been made of his "hiding in plain sight" but I never bought into this angle. He obviously had dirt on some very important people and made it plain that he would bring them down with him, if anyone actually made serious allegations. It's well-documented that he was a regular visitor to Chequers when Thatcher was in power; also that - during the 1980s - she repeatedly tried to get him a knighthood but was warned off by senior Civil Servants, before somehow managing it in her last year of office. In the same year, he was made a Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great (KCSG) by Pope John Paul II.
It's an awful story from start to finish, really. There's an obvious parallel with Max Clifford, another one with dirt on famous people, but it didn't save him from prosecution. Savile must have had some seriously explosive stuff, but I guess we'll never find out now, what with him being dead and all that.