There may have been poetic licence involved, and perhaps it was partly bravado, but there was some truth in the story. "I never had anyone beaten up, but I did not take any nonsense in the dance halls," he told another newspaper. "I had to look after the welfare of hundreds of youngsters. I was protecting my young patrons from drugs and other immoral influences." Part clubland heavy, part teetotaller and practising Roman Catholic – the paradox was typical of Savile. In Africa, we say that a person is a person through other persons. That’s why God gave Adam that delectable creature, Eve.’ Think of the Garden of Eden and be a leaf on a tree.  The key task, Clare argued, was not revealing the repressed and the forgotten, but processing and understanding what was already known The photographs taken of the Queen at Royal Ascot as her horse won the Gold Cup showed a picture of pure happiness.

Political activist Bruce Kent was interviewed in 1985 and remembers Clare as "a decent man who had done his homework . . . with a direct but non-hostile and honest approach. I was well used by then to journalists who had their own knives to grind. He got me to talk openly and frankly . . . I remember leaving the BBC that day and thinking that I had got quite a lot off my chest." Instinctively, I do resist change. On the whole I like things as they are. Or, better still, I like them as they were. If you are feeling negative, simply say to yourself: ‘I am going to be positive’, and that, in itself, can trigger a change in how you feel.

In turn, he gave medical students of a later generation much to think about. Professor Simon Wessely, of King's College London and the Institute of Psychiatry, said: "Anthony Clare was the reason I did psychiatry; when I was asked to write on '10 books that changed me' for the British Journal of Psychiatry, my first choice was Psychiatry in Dissent, because it inspired me to chose psychiatry as a career when I was a medical student."

I’d much rather that she hadn’t died but it was inevitable therefore it had to be. Once upon a time I had to share her with a lot of people. We had marvellous times but when she was dead she was all mine, for me. So therefore it finished up right, you understand, and then we buried her.”

The intimacy of the discussions undoubtedly heightened the emotional temperature in the small BBC studios where they were recorded. Jimmy Savile: ‘One of the UK’s most prolific known sexual predators.’ Photograph: Manchester Daily Express/SSPL/Getty The Savile interview Forensic psychiatrist Dr Seena Fazel, who has studied dozens of child sex abuse cases, has viewed the transcripts and told Channel 4 News that he believes Savile’s problems stem from unresolved issues from childhood and “emotional poverty”. Somehow, Clare created a space where even the introverted were willing to speak about their personal lives to an audience of millions on national radio.

In a way one can see his offending now as a way of enforcing his power, it’s essentially an act of power, abusing power. Patricia Casey writes: I first met Anthony in 1981, when I was a psychiatric researcher in Nottingham. He came to give a lecture, and my abiding memory was of a complex and erudite talk delivered without notes or slides. He invited me to visit his research department, and that began a long professional and collegial relationship with him. After the prize-giving, tea was served in the school dining room and there, carved into the wood panelling above the fireplace, was the famous line from one of the Odes of Horace: ‘ Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero’. It translates, more or less, as: ‘Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.’

‘I haven’t got an interest in charity, not really’

Clare decided on medicine as a career when he was teenager recovering from an accident in hospital. It seemed to him to be interesting work. Later, as a doctor, he was seeing patients in general wards who were clearly distressed and depressed, and the doctors didn't know what to make of them: "This was during the 1960s of course, a time when psychiatry had become a very interesting branch of medicine. I had read RD Laing's remarkable book The Divided Self, and that was a great influence on me." In 2011, the co-author of the study, Bruno Frey, in another paper, Happy People Live Longer, reported that happy people live 14 per cent longer than unhappy people, increasing their longevity by seven-and-a-half to ten years.This finding accords precisely with the 2013 findings of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and with research begun in Oxford, Ohio, in the Seventies among the local inhabitants then aged50 and over.Forty years on, in Oxford, Ohio, who has survived in good health? Those who had a positive outlook on their life and impending old age have lived, on average, 7.6 years longer than those with negative views. The other day, I happened to be with the singer Rod Stewart, when he was given a model train as a present. Model railways are Rod’s passion. To see his happy face light up with delight as he opened his present was positively heartwarming.