Steve Coogan’s take on the serial sex offender is astonishingly spooky. But questions remain as to whether it should have been made – and whether the BBC has given itself too easy a ride
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.
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 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.
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.
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