“Exposure: Banaz: An Honour Killing” and “Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile”

Presented by ITV’s documentary anthology Exposure, these films exhibited both sensitivity and unblinking honesty in examining two different cultural horrors in Great Britain. Banaz: An Honour Killing chronicled a young Kurdish-British woman’s brutal murder –- punishment punishment ordered by members of her own family for shaming them. She had dared to leave her abusive husband and date another man. The crushing centerpiece is a video, recorded at one of her several visits to the police, in which she predicts her demise and the likely perpetrators. Almost as powerful are candid interviews with Banaz’s sister, who is in hiding, fearing for her own life, and with police and prosecutors who convicted her killers but remain deeply attached to her and bereft that their system failed her. The subject of The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, meanwhile, evokes no sympathy. A beloved comic icon, Savile had hobnobbed with the Rolling Stones and Margaret Thatcher and had been knighted for his work on TV shows like Top of the Pops and for his prolific charity fundraising. Producer Lesley Gardiner, working with child-protection officer Mark Williams-Thomas, broke the story posthumously that Sir Jimmy was also a voracious sexual predator who preyed on underage girls and that BBC colleagues had known of his perversity and said nothing. The telecast’s revelations generated an avalanche of media coverage and led to a nationwide police investigation that has so far turned up more than 450 victims. For dissecting two criminal grotesqueries, steadfastly putting context above sensationalism, a Peabody Award goes to Exposure’s Banaz: An Honour Killing and The Other Side of Jimmy Savile.