'Jimmy Savile invited me in... then what he said chilled me'

In 2005, then Manchester Evening News features writer Simon Donohue travelled to Leeds to interview Jimmy Savile in his penthouse apartment to discuss rumours of an appearance on I'm a Celebrity... and a Jim'll Fix It comeback. Following the broadcast of a new BBC drama depicting the life of the disgraced TV star, here Simon looks back on an 'unsettling' encounter he describes as among his 'oddest professional experiences'.

In the days before social media made pretty much anyone so easily accessible, a journalist's contact book was an invaluable tool. Any opportunity to add names and numbers was grasped. I’d worked on a 'family friendly' Sunday tabloid while in my first couple of years as a reporter and it was at the Northern News and Echo that I picked up the habit of collecting contacts.

Colleagues would swap the numbers they had and we sometimes pretended we were from The Sun and borrowed their account with the Celebrity Numbers service (it really existed) when there were other people we wanted to get in touch with for a vox pop or comment. That's how I ended up with the home telephone number of Sir Jimmy Savile.

A few years later, I was working as a feature writer with the Manchester Evening News. It was a quiet week. I was bored and looking for something interesting to write about.

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Speculation was rife about who might be heading into the jungle on I'm A Celebrity, including Sir Jimmy Savile. Savile had links to Manchester - he'd lived and worked in the city as a DJ. He was in my book of