Why did the BBC choose to rake over the most shameful part of their history? Netflix had already put together a brilliantly dark and excoriating take down of Savile and his career so why did the BBC go there? I believe the BBC had decided to make their show before Netflix but there was a danger that, whatever they did, however they approached it, they'd be criticised - and they were.
Primarily, among friends I've spoken to and published critics, there's a feeling the BBC let themselves off too easily but I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. While the programme, The Reckoning (BBC1/iPlayer, directed by David Blair and Sandra Goldbacher and written by Dan Davies and Neil McKay) is not the full mea culpa some would have liked, or expected, but neither is it a complete absolvement from guilt.
I think they've got it, just about, right (after getting it very very wrong for a very very long time). Ultimately, many in the BBC were groomed by Savile just as surely as he groomed Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Louis Theroux, much of the royal family - including the now King Charles III, and, ultimately, the countless girls and boys who became his victims. Savile, from his early years as a DJ in Manchester, even had the police in his pocket.
Steve Coogan, it must be said, is fantastic as Savile - playing him as he ages across five decades. He's creepy, he's chilling, an ogre of a man, and when he 'turns' on his victims it's absolutely horrifying - the camera tracks away out of respect. With what we all know now, it's only too believable but therein lies another problem. Everyone knows the story of Jimmy Savile, his horrific crimes while 'hiding in plain sight' - so why tell the story again? Even if watching it, grey and depressing though much of it is, it remains compelling.
Each of the four episodes are bookended by testimony from Savile's real life victims. They talk of their mixed feelings on hearing of his death. The joy they all felt at his passing was tempered by the anger/sadness they felt at the fact he would never be made to pay for his crimes. He ruined so many people's lives at such a young age. One of his victims even committed suicide. It's unclear if she was the only one.
It's hard to know if the victim's testimonies justify the show or are being used as justification for the show so I'll reserve judgement on that and give a brief precis of how it all plays out. The elderly Savile is tapped up by budding author Dan Davies (Mark Stanley) who wants to write a book about him but wants Savile to tell the truth. Savile insists he is telling the truth as he narrates his life to the man he patronisingly calls Dr Wordsmith but, we all know, he's not telling the whole truth - and soon Davies begins to suspect as much as well.
We see Savile DJing and running nightclubs in Manchester back in 1962. We see him having gatecrashers beaten up by his goons and we see him, and his equally horrendous understudy - another abuser and later a convicted rapist who called Savile 'father' - Ray Teret (Robert Emms), taking young girls back home with them and forcing them into sexual acts.
This, of course, will be a recurrent theme. Savile attacked girls, and sometimes boys, everywhere he could. At discos, in his car, on the promenade at Scarborough, at Stoke Mandeville, in his house, in his mother's house, even backstage at Jim'll Fix It. These scenes are even more disturbing than when Jimmy Savile introduces Rolf Harris on Top Of The Pops or poses for photographs with Ronnie Kray and Peter Sutcliffe.
Savile could never resist attaching himself to a celebrity. Ingratiating himself with them made for good cover so we see photos of him with The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, and Margaret Thatcher (who had him knighted, spent many Christmases with him, and is played in The Reckoning by Fenella Woolgar) and he boasts to teenagers about having egg and chips with The Kinks and meeting The Four Seasons, Pope John Paul II, and The Black & White Minstrels!
We see his career as it progresses. Shows at Radio Luxembourg, touring the country in a camper van, running the Leeds Mecca, inveigling himself into a position of trust at the Leeds General Infirmary and getting The Beach Boys and Roy Orbison to play there, buying his mum a house in Scarborough, joining the BBC and presenting the first ever (and part of the last ever) Top Of The Pops, running marathons, suggesting (and failing) to launch a show called Savile's Travels (!), Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville, 'clunk click, every trip', being made an OBE (and later knighted), presenting Songs of Praise, Jim'll Fix It, publishing a book called, and about, 'Stranger Danger', and appearing on Through The Keyhole and Celebrity Big Brother when his fame started to wane - though only slightly. His funeral was almost a state occasion.
We see Savile's complicated relationship with his mother Agnes - or The Duchess as he called her (Gemma Jones). The Duchess didn't approve of pop music and felt Savile should have settled down and started a family. In a confession booth, she admits to the priest she's worried he may have a dark side and, as the youngest of seven children, she may not love him as much as she should. We see Savile in the confession booth telling the priest (James Quinn) that he has sinned. He accepted a free meal from a local cafe. When he hints at far far darker transgressions he does it in an "asking for a friend" way that the priest doesn't appear to fully buy.
While Coogan is excellent throughout there are superb supporting performances from the likes of Jones, Quinn, Stanley, and Emms as well as Mark Lewis Jones who plays Charles Hullighan - the head porter at Leeds General Infirmary, Siobhan Finneran as his wife Beryl - a woman who doesn't trust Savile from the off and has good reason not to, Peter Wight as Peter Jaconelli, a paedophile ice cream vendor who also happens to be Mayor of Scarborough, Fode Simbo as Victor - a porter at the infirmary, Michael Jibson as assistant head, and then head, of light entertainment at the BBC Bill Cotton, Julian Rhind-Tutt as BBC producer Johnnie Stewart, and Barbara Wilshere as Anna Instone, head of the BBC's gramophone department.
Cotton and Stewart are won over by Savile and the success he makes of his shows and, it seems to me, they turn a blind eye to both rumours about his behaviour and, in a couple of instances, some very blatant clues as to what he's up to. Instone, however, is clear from the off that she doesn't like the man and that they shouldn't be working with him. It's a recurrent theme in The Reckoning that it is older women who seem to be able to see what's right in front of their eyes yet it is older women who are ignored or sidelined as easily as young girls and boys.
Whenever 'Dr Wordsmith' gets close to the dark truth about Savile, Savile bats it away by saying he has no "side" and "what you see is what you get". He blames "naysayers" and journalists who want to pick up the metaphorical toilet seat and have a look at what's beneath. The famous catchphrases - "now then, now then", "how's about that, then", "guys and gals" - and a new one - "unsolicited testimonial" if somebody says something nice about him in a meeting - come across as creepy rather than charming and just to add to the already horrific picture of a 50+ year career of sexual abuse, rape, and paedophila it's suggested that Savile was also a necrophile. That he may have even violated the corpse of his own dead mother.
So there's not a lot of laughs. I felt a bit hollowed out watching it yet compelled to continue. There are some genuinely sad scenes (a mother mourns for one of Savile's victims) and there are chilling ones. Not least the ones when Savile reveals his true self to his initially unsuspecting victims. The terrified look on the faces of young victims like Kevin (Tommy Finnegan) and Sara (Tia Dutt) tell the story in a way the written word perhaps could not.
You can see how, in a moment, they have had the best day of their life turned into the worst. Their innocence has been stolen forever. Their lives will never be the same again. Worst of all, they will have to watch their abuser on television for decades after. They will have to hear the royal family, the Prime Minister, and most of the country sing his praises. The more fame and success Jimmy Savile achieved, the more he cultivated his eccentricity, the more he cultivated his eccentricity the more those he had under his spell remained under his spell, and the longer they remained under his spell the longer he was able to rape children. In the end he was never caught. When the world finally came to realise who the real Jimmy Savile was his grave was destroyed. Considering all the lives he destroyed it doesn't even feel close to justice. Jimmy Savile always claimed to be a deeply Christian man. I wonder how he's doing in Hell.
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