TV review: At moments The Reckoning is too awful to sit through. At the same time, Steve Coogan’s ability to recreate Jimmy Savile’s cheesy anticharm is uncanny

By Ed Power

The horror continues to build throughout the second episode of The Reckoning, the BBC’s often unwatchable meditation on the sins of Jimmy Savile (BBC One, Tuesday, 9pm). We’ve moved forward to the 1970s when Top of the Pops was the biggest brand on television and BBC DJs such as Savile were superstars, almost as famous as the singers with whom they rubbed shoulders.

The Reckoning is once more a showcase for Steve Coogan, whose Savile is a grinning predator, seemingly without conscience. The script continues to go easy on the BBC, however. In one scene, for instance, Savile is hauled in for questioning after a young girl he meets on Top of the Pops and subsequently abuses kills herself.

He first attempts to gaslight his bosses. “It’s a sad fact a lot of these young girls are so obsessed with fame they don’t know truth from fantasy,” he says. But when a lawyer later grills him, it is made clear that Savile holds all the cards.

He’s the biggest name in show business – is the BBC going to to throw him overboard? “You need to think about who it is you’re talking to,” he says to the barrister, who subsequently clears Savile of all wrongdoing. The message is that the fault lies entirely with Savile and his almost supernatural powers of bullying and persuasion – rather than with the corporation, which shrugged and moved on.

Savile knew people were on to him – and so created the fiction that rumours about his behaviour were fuelled by jealousy. “You get naysayers trying to stop you, by making up stories about things that didn’t happen,” he tells a journalist friend after catching wind that one of the papers is preparing a story about his activities.

Everyone else fawns over Savile. He receives an OBE. The BBC has him host Songs of Praise. The hospital manager who once disapproved of Savile is now delighted by his appearances. This is the megastar who arranged visits by the Beach Boys and Roy Orbison. Yes, his behaviour can be unusual from time to time, “but that’s Jimmy”.

The Reckoning makes for strange viewing. At moments, it is simply too awful to sit through. At the same time, writer Neil McKay’s evocation of the beige dreariness of the 1970s is uncanny – as is Coogan’s ability to recreate Savile’s cheesy anticharm. He had presence, without question. But how someone who gave off such creepy vibes ever ended up on the airwaves is hard to fathom – one more mystery destined to linger for as long as Savile’s name is part of the British entertainment’s parade of shame and horror.

Source: The Reckoning episode two review: How Jimmy Savile became leader of British entertainment’s parade of shame and horror

Steve Coogan delivers a powerfully slithering performance as Savile but The Reckoning seems uninterested in the institutional indifference that enabled the DJ’s years of sex abuse

It’s hard to fathom what the BBC hopes to achieve with The Reckoning (BBC One, Monday, 9pm), its four-part dramatisation of the evils perpetuated by Jimmy Savile.

The crimes of Savile, for decades one of the broadcaster’s biggest stars, are well documented. Less so are the alleged cover-ups at the BBC and elsewhere that allowed him prey with impunity on young people. But this controversial four-part chronicling of Savile’s loathsome rise to national treasure status seems uninterested in the institutional indifference that enabled the DJ and presenter become a depraved figure hiding – if that’s even the word – in plain sight. The unspoken message is that this man was a depraved force of nature: who could have stopped him?

As Savile, Steve Coogan delivers a powerfully slithering performance. However, it is also slightly cartoonish: there is a hint of a demon Alan Partridge about his Savile. That isn’t to deny the horror as, buzzard-like, he circles his victims.

A scene at Leeds General Infirmary where he approaches a young girl while dressed as a jester is perhaps the most stomach-turning in the first of four episodes (part two follows on Tuesday with the concluding instalments to follow next week), though, to be sure, it has lots of competition.

But it feels important to separate Coogan’s portrayal – and it is honest and lacking in vanity – from the manner in which Savile’s monstrousness is framed. One striking decision by writer Neil McKay is to explore his abuse not in the context of his career at the BBC but through the prism of his Catholicism.

In an early sequence in which an ageing Savile holds forth to a biographer, he talks about feeling the hand of the “big fella” on his shoulder. In flashbacks, his mother is framed by a crucifix in practically every scene. Would McKay have obsessed over Savile’s faith had he been a devout Anglican? You have to wonder.

The Reckoning opens with interviews with four victims. “When I heard he’d died I was actually pleased that horrible specimen was dead,” says one. “He groomed a whole nation,” adds another. But he also groomed the BBC and it’s telling how incurious The Reckoning is, in part one at least, about the broadcaster’s role in his rise. It has been confirmed that The Reckoning will not cover the suppression of a Newsnight report into his crimes shortly after his death. But why not make a drama about that scandal rather than put Savile where he always wanted to be: squarely in the spotlight?

Savile was wicked and degenerate – these facts are plain as day. But what about the broadcaster which beamed him into livingrooms across Britain and Ireland for decades? And yes, again, that Newsnight investigation – an incident hat has echoes of the subterfuge of the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland. In the wake of recent claims about another former BBC employee, Russell Brand, it is disappointing that a series about one of Britain’s favourite entertainers should be so lacking in soul-searching.

Source: The Reckoning: Drama about Jimmy Savile’s depraved trail of destruction lets BBC off the hook