“What transpired was unspeakable,” he told the Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine. “But it’s wrong to entirely blame the culture of the BBC.
“Savile was in deep with the Royals, with Mrs Thatcher, with the hospitals and with Broadmoor.
“There’s a whole establishment that let him into its heart. Not just the BBC.”
Dave Lee Travis, however – the former BBC DJ who recently received a three-month suspended sentence for indecent assault – was not in the same league as Savile, he argued.
“He’s not a nasty guy,” he said of Travis. “There was no bad vibe about him. I was never aware of anything remotely sleazy about Dave.”
At worst he was “possibly misguided,” he said.
Sentencing Travis in September, a judge described his offence as “an intentional and unpleasant sexual assault” on a researcher working on the TV programme The Mrs Merton Show.
Edmonds, who has previously spoken of his desire to buy the BBC, described it as a “total mess,” and warned it would be “lost” if it carried on the way it was.
The presenter of Channel 4’s Deal or No Deal said: “There are too many chiefs, they throw money around, but they don’t know what they are throwing money at.”
Jeremy Paxman, the former Newsnight presenter, and the Dimblebys were hypocrites, meanwhile, who “take the money and then attack the people who pay them,” he claimed.
Edmonds also said he had not voted for two years because, he alleged, Westminster politicians do not tell the public the truth.
Savile, whose crimes have only been properly examined since his death, used to flaunt his friendship with the Royal family, gave marital advice to the Prince of Wales and the late Princess Diana, and spent Christmas at Chequers with Mrs Thatcher when she was prime minister.
He is accused of perpetrating sexual abuse on a string of NHS hospital premises, as well as elsewhere.
Earlier this month the High Court heard the number of people intending to make claims after being sexually abused by the disgraced DJ had risen to more than 200.
