There were no cameraphones when Margaret Thatcher spent Christmas Day at Chequers with Jimmy Savile in the 1980s. But the BBC’s controversial and much anticipated Savile drama The Reckoning serves as a sort of historical Instagram, bringing vivid and intimate pictures from the kitchen and halls of the prime ministerial retreat.
With Steve Coogan’s cunningly unctuous Savile and Fenella Woolgar’s icily strategic Thatcher matching each other for full body-capture acting, these superb scenes in the third of the four hour-long episodes illustrate how the prime minister so fell for Savile that she placed a serial sex offender in charge of Broadmoor psychiatric hospital.
Bookended by reality interviews with four Savile survivors (Darien, Susan, Sam and Kevin), the four episodes cover the years from 1962 to 2011, requiring the 57-year-old Coogan to age down 21 years and up 27 to portray Savile from northern dancehall DJ to corpse.
Wigs, latex and putty allow Coogan to spookily reproduce Savile at six stages of depravity, but it is the actor’s ear that astonishes, musically notating the differences between on-air and off-air speech and their thickening with age, rage and, eventually, booze. He also reproduces, with physiological accuracy rather than caricature, the curious hopping-loping walk and bent-double pounce to kiss a woman’s hand, arm and wherever else he could. The performance deserves multiple awards, though Coogan may not get them as jurors may balk at being seen to give an award “to” Savile.
Savile’s Chequers seduction of the country’s top politician (who eventually gave him the knighthood he craved) serves as a broader metaphor for how the platinum-haired Yorkshireman groomed and used a prince (now king), a pope (who granted Savile a separate Vatican knighthood), BBC managers (who signed him up to Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It) and NHS bosses, who allowed him the run of their wards to indulge in paedophilia and morgues for necrophilia.
The hint of the latter is inevitably one of the bleakest and most startling scenes in TV drama, but it is handled with visual decorum, as are the sexual assaults. Director Sandra Goldbacher and producer Clare Shepherd never allow the camera to be a voyeur: what Savile has done to the young victims is implied by shocked or tearful faces. It helps that writer Neil McKay and executive producer Jeff Pope are TV’s supreme court of criminal judgment, having previously brought Peter Sutcliffe, Fred West, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady to their dock.
Some think the drama should never have been made at all. Others think the BBC, which funded Savile’s rise and failed to prevent him offending, should not have been the ones to make it. Technically, The Reckoning is an independent production by ITV Studios, with McKay and Pope denying any censorship. It fulfils their aim to show Savile from the inside, with particular emphasis on his warped Catholicism, and how powerful people dupe institutions.
The Reckoning is impeccable as far as it goes, but its reception will be defined by debate over those parameters. In order, the institutions most discomfited by the drama will be the NHS, the Thatcherite Conservative party and the Roman Catholic church: two sexual assaults take place in a vestry during mass to a soundtrack of eucharistic prayers.
In contrast, the BBC seems to get a less severe reckoning. Managers are shown trying to bring Savile to account in the 60s and 70s, but are thwarted by his lies and lawyers. Those investigations did take place but their space and power within the scripts may leave the impression that the BBC was more rigorous than many suspect. Indulgence of the presenter is effectively blamed on the ratings greed of Sir Bill Cotton, the BBC boss who, perhaps conveniently, has been dead longer than Savile.
In a scene at the final Top of the Pops recording in 2006, the arc of the drama requires Savile to be a broken and bitter old man, furious at being a BBC bit-player. However, the review led by Dame Janet Smith into the BBC and Savile describes a sexual assault carried out by the then 79-year-old presenter on an employee during rehearsals (I reported that incident to the BBC in 2006), while a separate Scotland Yard investigation revealed a sexual assault on a child during the recording.
The drama clearly had to choose which moments to show, but the omission of these incidents could suggest that Savile’s BBC activities were very far in the past. After the press screening, McKay and Pope were questioned on that historical emphasis and the absence from the dramatisation of the cancelled Newsnight investigation into Savile in 2011 that led inadvertently to the exposure of his crimes by ITV.
They replied that those storylines would be a “whole separate drama”. Charlotte Moore, BBC director of content, should immediately commission it from Pope and McKay so that there can be a reckoning for those involved in Savile’s latter era at the BBC, some of whom are still receiving pay and pensions from the licence payer.
The Reckoning will air on BBC One at 9pm on 9 October; all episodes will be on BBC iPlayer.
