A reckoning of sorts, but is the Beeb letting itself off for aiding a monster? CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Steve Coogan’s Jimmy Savile drama

THE RECKONING (BBC1)

Rating:

What a flirt, that Maggie Thatcher, eh? Show her a bit of cheeky Northern charm, a flash of flattery, and she’d go coy and giggly as a schoolgirl.

Steve Coogan’s turn as the Top Of The Pops presenter and relentless sexual predator Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning (BBC1) depicts his 15-year friendship with the Tory leader as improbably playful, even risque.

Played by Fenella Woolgar, she responds to his flourishes with feigned innocence and blushes. I kept expecting her to shove him away with a cry of, ‘Ooh, you are awful… but I like you!’

It’s all part of a four-hour drama that lays the blame for Savile’s sickening crimes on every part of the establishment: The BBC which employed him, of course, but also the church, the health service, the government and the newspapers.

The effect is to diffuse blame away from Auntie and on to the rest of society. If everyone’s at fault, nobody has to carry the can.

Steve Coogan plays paedophile Jimmy Savile in controversial new BBC drama The Reckoning

Steve Coogan’s turn as the Top Of The Pops presenter and relentless sexual predator Jimmy Savile (pictured) in The Reckoning (BBC1) depicts his 15-year friendship with the Tory leader as improbably playful, even risque

All four episodes of the show, which airs from Monday, were screened for reviewers at BBC Broadcasting House this week, with a question-and-answer session to follow.

That makes it doubly difficult to assess: Ordinary viewers won’t binge-watch The Reckoning in a cinema setting, surrounded by professional colleagues, and they won’t have to listen to the writer, the producer, the star and a senior BBC executive defend their artistic decisions.

Charlotte Moore, the Beeb’s chief content officer, bridled at suggestions that The Reckoning minimises their culpability in creating a monster. Executive producer Jeff Pope protested that, short of devoting an entire episode to Savile at the BBC, little more could be said about the predator’s relationship with the broadcaster.

READ MORE: Fury as the BBC’s Jimmy Savile drama buries its Newsnight probe – as the broadcaster denies long-awaited series The Reckoning is a ‘face-saving exercise’

Writer Neil McKay rightly pointed out that there was no evidence of a concerted cover-up within the corporation, and that his script stuck meticulously to the known facts.

And Coogan fixed me with a mocking smile and said: ‘If you say that this is some sort of face-saving exercise about the BBC, and that we’re all involved in that, I think you and I both know that’s not true.’

But the fact is The Reckoning lets the broadcaster off lightly. Savile is depicted as a master manipulator, who played the big-headed eccentric clown to distract attention from his blatant sexual assaults on young women and children. When senior staff raise vague concerns, they are brushed aside. The head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton (Michael Jibson), who insists Savile must be harmless because he’s so good for ratings, is shown as gullible and wilfully short-sighted – but nothing worse.

The Reckoning fails to reckon up the influence exerted on the entire country by the BBC’s championing of Savile. It wasn’t simply that people in all walks of life were dazzled. It was his fame that made him invincible, and television bestowed that fame.

The drama is admittedly scrupulous in not glamourising Savile. Coogan continually emphasises the darkness in the man, the seediness and creepiness. We see little of the manic performer, much more of the bullying schemer.

The actor said he didn’t want to ‘render him some sort of pantomime villain’. He captures the voice perfectly, and with the aid of make-up is able to play the DJ at every stage of his adult life.

Gemma Jones plays Agnes, Savile’s deeply Catholic mother, who disapproved of her unmarried son’s rackety life before he found fame. The Reckoning takes a Freudian turn, arguing that Savile’s narcissism was rooted in his need to impress his mother, whom he called ‘The Duchess’.

She knew he was a liar and suspected him of much worse, but felt it was her duty to trust him. She was won over by his brazen charity antics, and the OBE he was awarded for it. He fooled her and, by extension, this enabled him to fool everyone. In Agnes’s final years she embraced the razzmatazz of his showbiz life. During the Q&A, McKay revealed Savile used to boast, ‘I turned the Duchess into a gangster’ – a telling quote that somehow wasn’t included in the script.

The Reckoning airs on BBC1 on Monday at 9pm

The title The Reckoning refers to the tallying of sins on Judgment Day. McKay said Savile used to quip that if St Peter didn’t allow him through the Pearly Gates, ‘I might have to break his fingers’ – another line that didn’t make it into the show.

The drama uses two devices to tell its story. Mark Stanley is journalist Dan Davies, who spent years interviewing Savile for a biography as his fame faded. It’s here that all the traits of a textbook psychopath are on show – the assumption of superiority, the bare-faced lying, the sly hints and riddles, the pride in appalling acts, the reckless revelations, the utter lack of conscience.

The second narrative device, one that underlines the human cost of Savile’s crimes, uses interviews with four real-life victims. The youngest was Kevin, a Cub Scout who appeared on Jim’ll Fix It and was molested in a BBC dressing room. The oldest was Susan, in her 20s, who delivered a pair of spectacles to Savile’s family home in Leeds. He sent her to the corner shop to buy him a pint of milk, ushered her inside for a cup of tea, and attacked her – then produced a microphone and interviewed her for a radio show.

Some of Savile’s dodgy pals feature, but there’s no reference to other predators at the BBC, such as Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall, or Savile’s Radio 1 colleague Chris Denning, who died in prison.

At most there’s a glancing reference to John Peel, whose first wife was 15 years old.

How Savile’s blatant sex abuses over many years as a BBC A-list star enabled many other predators to hide in plain sight is never explored. ‘It just wasn’t the story that we were telling,’ said Jeff Pope.

And now that The Reckoning has deflected attention in so many other directions, it’s a story that might never get told.

The Reckoning, BBC1 Monday, 9pm

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