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.
