Pigs flying, hell freezing over, extracting blood from a stone: all are satisfying, idiomatic expressions of the impossibility of certain tasks. You might be inclined, then, to add to that list something along the lines of, “That’s about as likely as the BBC making an entertaining, while soul-searching, primetime drama about their structural failure to deal with Jimmy Savile – and, in fact, the myriad ways in which they enabled him”. Less pithy than porcine wings, perhaps, but equally improbable.
But despite the obvious futility and derangement of the undertaking, BBC One has given it a go anyway. The Reckoning, a new four-part drama from Neil McKay and Jeff Pope, sees Steve Coogan inhabit the lank silver-haired, cigar-chomping, bejewelled form of the disgraced former disc jockey and knight of the realm, Jimmy Savile. “What you see with me,” Savile tells his biographer Daniel (Mark Stanley), “is what you get.” Except, of course, it isn’t. From the dancehalls of Manchester to the streets of Scarborough – and then, down south to the BBC – Savile leaves victims wherever he goes. “It’s just Jimmy being Jimmy,” his friend Charlie (Mark Lewis Jones) says, with a nervous sigh.
How can you turn the story of Savile – a man who indiscriminately attacked children and adults for decades, while cosying up to the British establishment – into entertainment
From the minute it was announced, The Reckoning has courted controversy. The trauma of Savile is still fresh for many of his victims, who have only had since his death in 2011 to process it openly. (It should be noted that several of them collaborate on this show and appear as talking heads.) But, more strikingly, how can you turn the story of Savile – a man who indiscriminately attacked children and adults for decades, while cosying up to the British establishment – into entertainment? Because anything aired as event TV, at 9pm across four nights on BBC One, must have something that makes people tune in. Would they try to bring light and shade and moral complication? Or just pain and misery and suffering?
Gemma Jones and Steve Coogan as Agnes and Jimmy Savile taking a walk in Scarborough— (BBC/ITV Studios/Matt Squire)
In truth, The Reckoning falls somewhere between these two stances. It is not shy about depicting Savile as an inveterate abuser – any time a young woman is introduced, even fleetingly, to the narrative, you can all but guarantee what will happen next – and yet the whole drama is predicated on the strength of his charisma. The other significant characters – Stanley’s wimpish reporter, Gemma Jones as Savile’s hard-to-please mother, Siobhan Finneran as a mate’s girlfriend who sees through him – all serve an expository purpose, rather than an emotional one. In the end, it is Coogan (often a magnetic performer himself) as Savile, a whirlwind of malign glamour, that holds the eye.
“Do you not sense that final reckoning approaching?” Daniel asks an ailing Savile. For Savile, we know the reckoning will never come. He gets caught – posthumously. He gets erased from the TV archive – posthumously. He gets stripped of his honours – posthumously. So, whose reckoning is it? Certainly not the BBC’s. Their complicity in shelving a Newsnight investigation into Savile is only mentioned, fleetingly, in a postscript. Several BBC executives – former BBC One controller Bill Cotton and Top of the Pops producer Johnnie Stewart, particularly – come out looking like wilfully ignorant patsies, but in most scenes involving the Beeb, there’s a (usually anonymised) woman there to raise some suspicions and exonerate any structural failings. The show’s conclusion seems to be that he got away with it thanks to a generalised culture that repressed victim’s voices, whether they were coming from discotheques, fish and chip stands, or, you know, the nation’s state-funded, beloved and trusted broadcaster.
And so, The Reckoning ends up feeling like a parade of villainy without a point to make. McKay and Pope take an anthropologist’s lens to the Sixties and Seventies – “Weren’t things different back then when an obviously strange man could walk hospital wards unattended?” they seem to say – without finding much introspection to grapple with. Margaret Thatcher (played in eerie caricature by Fenella Woolgar) is an easy target, but generally time and sensitivity preclude too much finger-pointing. The chief mortician who gave Savile unfettered access to the morgue at Leeds General Infirmary, for instance, is replaced by a suspicious orderly. The staff at Stoke Mandeville, who had fielded and ignored repeated reports about Savile’s behaviour, are entirely removed from proceedings.
Instead, The Reckoning is without a reckoning. “Don’t let this happen again,” implores one of Savile’s real-life victims, Darien, in the show’s closing moments. It is a stark, arresting reminder of the stakes involved. But who is this warning for? All of us, watching at home? Or the organisation that both enabled a paedophile and is now turning his life into an entertainment product? It is a distinction the show never draws, and thus it never manages to rise above the cheap lure of voyeurism.
