Available on the BBC iPlayer
Reviewed by Anthony C Green
I read Dan Davies excellent book on Savile, In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, almost as soon as it came out in 2014, roughly two years after news of Savile’s catalogue of crimes was revealed to the world, and three after the sickening orgy of media sycophancy that immediately followed ‘Jimmy’s’ death.
Almost immediately, my thoughts turned to who could play the man who was now Britain’s most notorious celebrity monster in a filmed dramatisation of his life. This might seem like a shallow response to a real-life horror story that lasted for approximately five decades, and a lifetime for his victims, and I can assure you it wasn’t my only thought on the case. But True Crime has been a popular staple of British drama throughout my life, and it was inevitable the story would be dramatised at some point.
From the off, it seemed to me that Steve Coogan would be perfect for the role.
Seven years later or so, I discovered that Coogan was also the choice of the powers-that-be at BBC drama. We will come shortly to the question of whether he was the correct choice.
But first we should address the point of whether this drama should have been made in the first place; and the allied question of whether the BBC, who were the host and enablers, even if unwittingly, of many of Savile’s crimes, were the right people to make it.
Personally, I think a gap of more than a decade since Savile’s crimes were revealed is long enough; and doing it now, whilst most of his victims are still with us, allows their voices to be heard. Indeed, each of the four-hour-long episodes is book-ended by the real voices of the real victims, often of those heavily featured in that particular episode. This is a powerful device, and is sufficient, in my eyes, to prevent the series from being mere, prurient entertainment.
As for the BBC. Yes, there is no doubt that our national broadcasting service afforded Savile many of his opportunities to abuse, but then so did many other organisations and individuals; and we don’t really know the extent to which Savile’s crimes were known within the BBC. Clearly, there were rumours, and investigations which had they been more thorough may have led him to face justice within his lifetime. But rumours are not evidence, and it’s always easy to be wise after the event. We shall return to this matter later.
Yes, there was also always a suspicion amongst the general public that something wasn’t quite right about this ‘celebrity’, as I shall also return to, but there is also truth in the words of one of his victims that ‘He groomed a nation.’
Stoke Mandeville hospital in Aylesbury and Leeds Royal infirmary, both places where Savile won much credit for his volunteering and fund-raising, Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, which he was virtually running at one point, by virtue of the insistence of his close friend’ Margaret Thatcher, the management at the Duncroft ‘approved’ girl’s school who afforded him access to ‘troubled’ teenage girls, the Catholic Church, both as an institution (he was awarded a Papal Knighthood to go with his British Knighthood, the latter again at Thatcher’s insistence despite the award having been blocked several times by top civil servants precisely because of the rumours which surrounded him in life), and many others in high places, including our current Monarch, all of these and others were every bit as compliant in Savile’s long ‘career’ of evil as the BBC.
And let us not forget the police, who interviewed him on several occasions (including in connection, acting on a tip-off, to the Ripper murders in the late seventies, though this is not covered in the series), the last time, and under caution, only two years before his death.
Neither of these institutions and individuals either could not or would not see the truth about ‘Sir Jimmy’.
Some reviewers have raised the point that the BBC’s decision to pull a Newsnight investigation into Savile a year after his death is somewhat glossed over in The Reckoning. It’s a valid criticism, but the issue is dealt with in a text update at the end of the series, and I’m not sure any more than this was necessary. The decision to pull the Newsnight episode was clearly a grave error, which the BBC later acknowledged (not that they had any choice once ITV had run the story). But to cover the ‘why’s and wherefores’ of this decision would I feel have taken up more space than it really deserved within the story, which was essentially that of Savile’s life, rather than the aftermath of his death. This issue should really be the subject of a separate program, whether as drama or, better still, in documentary format.
One criticism I will make of the BBC is that, in the final episode, the scenes where we see his long running television show Jim’ll Fix It cancelled in 1994 after almost two decades on air, and Savile’s role in the last ever episode of Top of the Pops (TOTP) reduced to that of a mere cameo (and the two events are composited together, despite occurring twelve years apart), seem to have been inserted merely to give the impression that the organisation had finally gotten its act together, and no longer saw a place for Savile in their schedules. If this was the case, was it because they knew more than they are, even now, prepared to admit? As it is, these sections smack of a self-justification that raises more questions than it answers.
There are some other minor criticisms of the series I will raise. At one point, the writer of the screenplay (presumably), who otherwise does a fine job of adapting Davies’ book, Neil Mckay, puts into the mouth of Savile the words, when justifying, in the abstract, whilst of course admitting to nothing relating to his own behaviour, the often-amoral behaviour of rock stars: ‘I bet David Bowie never checked birth certificates.’ Why pick on Bowie? One can only suspect it’s because he’s no longer with us and the dead can’t sue. As readers might know, I’m a massive Beatles buff. But I’m, prepared to admit that the girls who threw themselves at the band on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, or around Mathews Street in Liverpool, or indeed on the mammoth world tours John Lennon would later compare to the Last Days of Rome in their scale of sexuality depravity, weren’t often asked to prove identity of age either. But one can only imagine how the lawyers of Sir Paul, or of Mick Jagger or Elton John or any other living rock legend would have responded if their client had been so blatantly named.
There were also times in the series when I wasn’t sure where we were in the chronology. For instance, in a scene supposedly back-stage at TOTP, we have Savile running through a selection of some of the acts due to appear that night. He mentions Joe Cocker, which had me thinking ‘OK, 1967/68, probably.’ But then he brings up Marc Bolan. Admittedly, this will matter more to someone like me, with my almost autistic interest in the history of popular music, and a corresponding regard for historical accuracy, but I couldn’t help but reflect that at this point in the sixties Bolan was still an elf-like presence in the hippy-folk duo Tyrannosaurus Rex, sitting cross legged, strumming an acoustic guitar on a cushion, the days when he would be making appearances on TOTP singing Glam-Rock anthems as the leader of T-Rex still some way away.
When it comes to music in general, considering its centrality to his career (though John Peel rightly observed that he was a music presenter who showed no real interest in music), first as a manager of dance-halls and clubs in Manchester and his home-city of Leeds, then as a Radio One DJ and as one of the chief presenters of what was the nations flagship chart music station for over forty years, from the time he hosted the very first edition in 1964, we get precious of it. Yes, we see real-life footage and photographs of him with the leading figures of the music industry, including the Beatles and Elvis, but we hear very little audio. The only actual songs I noted hearing snippets of through the four hours of footage was I Could Make You Mine, a very minor hit for Danny Marks and the Marksman in the early sixties, and You Were Made For Me by Freddy and the Dreamers from roughly the same period.
I can only think this was for reasons of cost, or perhaps because many artists didn’t wish their music to be associated with Savile, and/or with a show that was likely to prove highly controversial.
So, nit-picking criticisms over with, what of the series as a whole?
In format, the writers decided to hang the series around the many hours of interviews that Dan Davies conducted at sporadic intervals during the last seven years of Savile’s life. These interviews were indeed arranged with the idea of a book in mind, the idea originally germinating from the time of Davies’ appearance as a twelve-year-old in the audience at the filming of an episode of Jim’ll Fix It, after which he took a lifelong dislike of the ‘star’, even to the extent of him beginning to compile his own ‘Savile dossier’, as detailed in Davies’ introduction to his book.
Savile, naturally had a very different book in mind to that which was finally published posthumously as In Plain Sight, and the verbal sparring between Davies and an aging Savile, during which his future biographer tries to uncover the secret that Savile insists does not exist, ‘The secret is that there is no secret…What you see is what you get,’ interspersed with flashbacks to Savile’s life, beginning with his time managing the dancehalls in in the early sixties up to and including the period when the interviews were conducted, works extremely well structurally.
Savile’s childhood is completely absent, dismissed by him with the words ‘I didn’t have one’. But by the account given by Davies in his book, it wasn’t a happy one.
Any speculation as to the motivation of Savile for his lifetime of abuse, can only be just that, speculation. And, inevitably, there is much speculation in The Reckoning. What matters is, is it believable, plausible speculation?
I believe it is.
We have no way of knowing the true relationship between Savile and his mother, the woman he called ‘The Duchess’ until her death and long beyond; and perhaps, if the more macabre rumours about it are anything like the truth, we are better off not knowing. Did Savile feel unloved because he was the last born of seven, perhaps conscious of the fact that he was an after-thought/an accident, with his yearning for fame and to be accepted amongst the higher echelons of society driven by a desire to somehow win his mother’s love? Did ‘the Duchess’ really agonise about her inability to give him the love he needed? We don’t know, but it’s a powerful moment when we see this devout Catholic woman, played superbly by Gemma Jones, express what she sees as her own failings in this regard during a confessional session with her priest, though maybe her statement that her inability to give her son natural parental love may have unleashed a ‘darkness’ in him is a little overstated.
Religious, which in this context means solely Catholic, themes are powerfully invoked and utilised throughout the four episodes. One of the victims expresses the view that Savile’s compulsive ‘do-gooding’ was perhaps seventy-five percent pure grooming behaviour, typical of the abuser, but also maybe twenty-five percent an attempt to outweigh his litany of evil and tip the scales of justice in his favour in the eyes of God.
This is a very strong thread running throughout both the book and the television adaptation. I won’t claim to be well-versed enough in Catholic theology to know how strongly this idea of a balance between good and bad actions determining your fate at death features. But it does seem a strong possibility, with anecdotal evidence in the form of some of his own statements, as well as those of others within his orbit, that Savile himself believed that his ceaseless charity work would somehow offset the almost unimaginable harm he had done to others.
The religious angle certainly works as a way of understanding Savile’s character, in so far as anyone can understand it at all. And it doesn’t exclude what is the most plausible explanation for his actions: that he was simply a psychopath who enjoyed the power to dominate and hurt others for its own sake. It was certainly also possible that he did also worry that there may be consequences coming his way at life’s end, and this is strongly suggested as Savile grows closer to death in the series.
But it may also have been possible that he believed in nothing, that his religion was as much a public sham as his celebrity persona, that so long as he continued to successfully manipulate the police and the showbiz and political establishment, then there would be no consequences. As much as we see hints, especially in the final episode, that he worried about the fate that awaited him at death, there are also indications that he increasingly worried that the net was beginning to tighten around him in life, especially when some of those close to him (as far as anyone was ‘close’ to him), like the former Mayor of Scarborough Peter Jaconelli and Ray Teret, a fellow DJ and one time Savile assistant (who Savile, for reasons that were never made clear, insisted call him ‘Father’) were exposed as paedophiles and abusers.
So, to Steve Coogan. As an actor he will be forever associated with his brilliant comic creation Alan Partridge. But he had already shown himself to be a talented and versatile straight actor in such underrated films as Philomena opposite Dame Judy Dench.
In The Reckoning he is quite simply brilliant.
The danger for an actor portraying any showbiz personality is to reduce the character to a collection of his well-known mannerisms and catchphrases, producing, at best, a decent impersonation. But acting is not impersonation. Mike Yarwood was a great impressionist, at least to people of my generation, but would anyone claim that he really nailed and relayed to us the true essence of, say, Harold Wilson or Eddy Waring, two of his most famous comedy portrayals?
Because that is the task of an actor in playing a real-life personality, to dig down deep beneath the obvious, beneath mere surface personality.
The problem with playing Savile for any actor was that, publicly, it seemed that there was no inner essence of the man. The Jimmy he showed to the world was nothing but a collection of catchphrases – ‘Now then, now then, now then’, ‘Ow’s about that, then?’, ‘Young man/woman, are you married?’, that stupid sub-Tarzan like noise he used to make which is too difficult for me to create in words. The catchphrases, plus the outlandish clothing, the long blonde hair, the bling and of course the over-sized, ever-present cigar. All of that was ‘Jimmy Savile’. Fellow Radio One DJ Dave Lee Travis commented after his death, but before his secret life as a serial sexual abuser broke, ‘I knew and worked with him for over forty-five years, and I never had a single meaningful conversation with him.’
Nobody really knew Savile. The public mask almost never slipped, and so any imagining of how he was in private could only come from the testimony of those who worked with him, from the descriptions of his victims, and, yes, from the imagination. All that said, Coogan gets his performance almost note perfect, giving us the larger-than-life character we came to know from his on-screen performances, and a very believable attempt at showing how he may have been when the cameras were absent.
(There was one point where Coogan did seem to momentarily slip into being Steve Coogan, which is often uncomfortably close to being Alan Partridge, but one very short-lived lapse in a program of such length is excusable.)
Sensibly, we do not see graphic depictions of the abuse itself. That would have been prurient and unnecessary. What we see is the set-up, where Savile engineers the situation where he will be alone undisturbed with his chosen victim, whether it be in the vestry of a church, in one of the ‘troubled’ girl’s schools he was allowed to frequent with such regularity, in a hospital ward or wherever, the confusion followed by fear on the face of the victim as she (in one case, in the series, ‘he’, and though we know there were other male victims, we do know that most of Savlle’s abuse was with young girls) as they realise what is about to happen, and the change in facial expression that comes over Savile as he switches from celebrity mode to sexual predator about to claim his latest prey mode, a change that is brilliantly accomplished by Coogan.
He also does a great job of aging Savile. Of course, he would have had much help from the BBC make-up department with this, but much is in the performance itself, accurately depicting the slowing down of movement, the note of weariness that comes with the knowledge that your best days are behind you and that you too are mortal, plus, in this case the fear that you could soon be facing you Day of Judgement, or indeed day of ‘reckoning’, as you prepare to meet your Maker.
The point was well made in the series that Savlle was always a middle aged, and later an old man in a world of young people. Already at the time he got his big break presenting TOTP he was in his late thirties. By the time Jim’ll Fix it and the height of his fame and power came along, he was pushing fifty. This should have perhaps raised more alarm bells than it did, though it wasn’t particularly unusual at the time.
In playing Savile at different points of his life over approximately a fifty-year period, Coogan quite simply does a superb job. I suppose there would have been a temptation for the producers to use a different actor to play the young(ish) Savile. But that would have deprived Coogan of the opportunity to simply become Savile for the duration of the series, and that would have been a pity.
Having talked of Savile never letting his public mask slip, I think the series could perhaps have given a nod to some individuals who did come close to loosening it from his face.
Doctor Anthony Clare interviewed Savile for his long-running radio series In the Psychiatrists Chair in 1991, and in a collection of his best interviews printed only a year later he concluded that ‘There is still something chilling about this 20th Century ‘Saint’ which intrigues me to this day.’ In the interview, Savile had talked about his nomadic existence, his absence of the usual human range of emotions, including a lack of empathy, his dislike of children despite his long running role as a presenter of a children’s program, his rejection of the need for close personal relationships besides that which he’d had with ‘the Duchess’ (he often said how having a wife would complicate his life, and that women in general gave you ‘brain damage’), his often alluded to sexual promiscuity, his apparent love of and need for the spotlight, and his lack of real interest in charity, despite his constant fund raising efforts.
All of this pointed to strong psychopathic tendencies. Of course, psychopathology only leads to criminal behaviour in a small number of cases. Psychopaths are often to be found in leading positions in business, in politics, in show business and in all walks of life. Reading Jon Ronson’s excellent book The Psychopath Test will inevitably have you thinking about individuals you have encountered in your own life, or are still perhaps involved with whose behaviour indicates psychopathic behaviour. Maybe it will even have you reflecting on a few traits of your own…
Apart from perhaps Clare, Louis Theroux, in his original 1999 documentary on Savile, using the relaxed, inimitable style for which he has rightly become renowned, came closer than anyone to breeching his subject’s cartoon-esque public persona. As indicated, I believe there always was, certainly from the time I properly became aware of him in the early ‘70’s, a public perception that there was something not quite right about Savile. This was not uncommon and was hugely amplified after the Theroux film aired. The documentary was quite simply the talk of the nation for days afterwards, particularly how Savile revealed that he had been very happy to have spent several days alone with his mother after her death (‘Because I had her all to myself…’ – chilling words in retrospect), and had since kept everything of hers in the flat in Scarborough he bought for her, just as she left it, apart from regularly having her clothes cleaned and ironed and returned to the closet in her bedroom.
People I knew found this weird to say the least.
There was also a scene, omitted from the original documentary but shown when Louis returned to the topic once the truth about his subject became known where, late at night, in one of his flats (the one in Leeds, I think), when Savile, apparently thinking the cameras and the microphones had been turned off for the night, talked about the way he would have ‘wrong ‘uns’ during his days of managing clubs in Leeds and Manchester, taken into the basement and given a beating, by his goons, and occasionally by himself. His demeanour here was very different to his public self, a glimpse of a far more threatening character lurking beneath.
Louis did press Savile on the increasingly negative public perception of him, in a scene in the back of a car, with Savile saying simply that whatever he’d done, he stood by it. Louis certainly gave the impression that he knew something, and that is what he says today, that he knew something, but he didn’t have any real inkling as to what. Ian Hislop, who looked very uncomfortable throughout an aging Savile’s appearance on Have I Got New For You said almost exactly the same thing.
We have no reason to disbelieve either Theroux or Hislop. But one man who says he did know, and not just something but pretty much everything, is John Lydon, Johnny Rotten as was. And we have hard evidence that points to the possibility of this being true, a radio interview from as early as the late 1970’s where he said words to the effect of ‘Jimmy Savile, I could tell you some dark shit about that one…’ This again raises the question of how many did know, and who, if anyone was doing their best to ensure that such knowledge didn’t become common knowledge.
Unsurprisingly, this part of the Lydon interview was not aired at the time it was recorded, but is easily findable on the Internet.
Another who seemed to know something, was the, now late, eighties pop star Pete Burns. He was present during Savile’s appearance in the Celebrity Big Brother House in January 2006 where the aging star made a brief cameo appearance. Part of this scene is depicted in The Reckoning, as evidence that Savile’s creepy behaviour towards females was continuing, and tolerated, even in the full glare of the television lights, even as he neared his eighties. But Burns words as Savile left the house, ‘He’ll take his secrets to the grave and beyond, Mr. Savile,’ nor fellow housemate George Galloway’s retrospectively fascinating, and accurate reply that ‘Nobody’s secrets survive the grave.’ weren’t depicted. That, I think, is a pity.
Finally, before winding up, I’ll come to one of the most controversial scenes, and one that I think did take some bravery on the part of the writers and the producers to include. That is the scene, towards the end of final episode, in the mortuary.
I say ‘brave’ because the necrophiliac aspect of Savile’s depravity, whilst common knowledge, has never been fully acknowledged. Indeed, I remember a radio interview concerning Savile where host Nicky Campbell cut short his guest when he strayed into this area with the words ‘That’s not in the public domain.’
Again, you don’t, rightly, see anything graphic. What we see is Savile take the opportunity to be alone with a body, before being interrupted and admonished by an outraged orderly, who clearly did know something, even if the scene was almost certainly apocryphal. Nevertheless, the viewers mind could not help but be drawn to Savile’s words about how much of a pleasure and a privilege it had been to spend time alone with ‘the Duchess’ after her death…
One thing that did shock me was when Davies, as part of the latter interview depictions, asks Savile why Leeds United fans at Elland Road sometimes taunted opposing fans with the chant of ‘Jimmy Savile will fuck you in the morgue.’
Did they, really? I can’t believe Davies, or adaptation screenwriter McKay would make this up, but if Leeds fans did indeed chant this, this shows a degree of public perception of Savile’s true character way beyond anything I imagined.
So, a sterling effort by the BBC, with a great cast, dominated by Coogan, but with shout-outs in particular to Mark Stanley as Davies, and in particular to Mark Lewis Jones as Savile’s near-life-long (sometimes, often with reservations) friend Charlie Hullighan, Faye McKeever as Charlie’s wife Alison, who despised Savile from the beginning, and brusquely spurned his personal advances towards her, and Gemma Jones, who I’ve mentioned, as the Duchess. The series was probably all the better for the fact that the cast, other than Coogan himself, were, whilst all solid, experienced actors, not household names.
The Reckoning is certainly worth four-hours of your life, though for a still more rounded analysis of Savile and the milieu within which he operated, I’d also recommend reading Davies’ book, upon which the series leans so heavily. It’s certainly one I shall soon be returning to.
In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile: Amazon.co.uk: Davies, Dan: 9781782067436: Books
Anthony C Green, October, 2023
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