COLEEN NOLAN has spoken of the shock and disgust she felt after disgraced Top of the Pops presenter and predatory paedophile Jimmy Savile invited her to his hotel room when she was just 14.
Speaking on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, the 56-year-ol ddescribed her unsettling encounter with the DJ and TV host who was exposed as one of the UK’s most prolific sex offenders after his death in 2011.
Savile’s victims likely number in their hundreds and, had circumstances differed, Nolan could easily have ended up among them.
Often referred to as Ireland's First Family of Music, the Nolan Sisters were among the first Irish musical groups to achieve international success, paving the way for the likes of The Fureys and The Corrs.
The youngest of the five performing sisters, Nolan became something of a target of Savile’s affections with the presenter filmed on Top of the Pops behaving inappropriately around the young teenager.
Watching back the alarming footage, Morgan asked Nolan whether the footage gave her “shudders” to look back at now, knowing what later emerged.
“You know when it came out about Jimmy Saville I wasn’t in any way shocked, thinking about it,” she said. "I was 14 [years old] there and that same night, he asked me to go to his hotel. He said he had a suite in a hotel and I should go up and see it and he’d look after me."
Horrified at the revelation, Morgan asked the singer how the encounter made her feel. The Loose Women star responded that while she was disgusted, she felt her sisters would have protected her from any unsolicited advances.
“Well at the time I just thought ‘you dirty old man’. As if I’m going to go up there, I wouldn’t do it anyway. I’ve got four sisters on the stage that would have beaten the crap out of him.”
Two years after Savile’s death in 2011, a joint report from Scotland Yard and the NSPCC concluded the presenter represented one of the UK’s most prolific known sexual predators.
Reflecting on the revelations that later emerged concerning Savile, Nolan said they were “Absolutely horrendous but in some ways, not surprising because he was always very touchy feely.
