I was at the game at Stirling on Saturday. The weekend coincided with the birthday of my younger son and I didn’t get home till later than usual.

As a result I hadn’t much time to think about the demise of Jimmy Savile.

Savile was certainly one of life’s one-offs. Instantly recognisable, among his lesser achievements was one I have noted before. He invented bling. No-one else on TV had his flamboyance yet there was an edge of irritation attached to his appearances, to the forced jollity, to the smugness he displayed on Jim’ll Fix It. (By the way, they weren’t “Jim’ll Fix It” badges. That was the name of the show. The wording on each medallion – and how Savilesque were they? – was “Jim Fixed It For Me.”) For all his hail fellow well met bonhomie you always felt that you never came near to the real man.

Yet he raised £30,000,000 pounds for various charitable causes (£12 million for Stoke Mandeville National Spinal Injuries Centre alone) and is said to have contributed 90% of his not insubstantial annual income to charitable trusts. That’s not a bad claim to fame.

He may have pioneered aspects of disc-jockeying and been a leader in parleying that endeavour into a wider media career but it was as if he pushed the world away. The TV interview he gave Louis Theroux offered the vision of someone not at all at ease with himself and his devotion to his dead mother strayed well beyond the admirable into the deeply strange. Whatever secrets actually lay behind the mask he presented to the world we may never know.

Perhaps it was appropriate he was born on Halloween.

James Wilson Vincent Savile: 31/10/1926 – 29/10/2011. So it goes.

Edited to add (17/10/12):- With the recent revelations of his abusing children and hospital patients that Halloween birthdate is even more spooky.