DEVIOUS CREEP (THE RECKONING)

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The BBC was always going to be on a hiding to nothing commissioning a drama about Jimmy Savile.

Loads of people have never forgiven the corporation for allowing Savile's broadcasting career to flourish, even when suspicions were raised about his behaviour.

In the build-up to 'The Reckoning,' in which Steve Coogan plays Britain's most infamous paedophile, some media commentators have accused the BBC of profiting out of his victims' misery.

The broadcaster has also faced accusations that it is using the drama to paint its own failings in a better light.

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Writer Neil McKay, his fellow executive producers Jeff Pope, Lucy Richer and Tom Dunbar and directors Susan Goldbacher and David Blair are aware of the huge challenges of taking on the story of Savile's exploitation of his celebrity status to abuse women and children.

Understandably they approach the subject with great caution, with text at the start of each episode that effectively reads like a mission statement as well as a disclaimer.

Viewers are informed: "This drama examines how he (Savile) was able to hide in plain sight, using his position to commit countless serious sexual offences, many against minors, and how the voices of so many were ignored and silenced.

"What follows is a dramatisation based on detailed research, published accounts and extensive interviews with survivors of his crimes.

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"Some names have been changed and done characters and scenes created for dramatic purposes."

The programme makers use archive footage of the real Savile - presenting 'Top of the Pops', fraternising with the then Prince Charles, Pope John Paul II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, fundraising for Stoke Mandeville Hospital, receiving his OBE and his very public funeral in Leeds - to ram home most of the events portrayed in the miniseries actually happened.

However perhaps the most interesting narrative decision is the inclusion of interviews during the drama with real life victims of Savile's.

Sam Brown, Kevin Cook and two other victims, known simply as Susan and Darien, tell their stories on camera and also give their perspective on the monster they encountered.

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All four of them don't hold back on venting their anger at the BBC and those Establishment figures who lauded Savile as a hero after his death, despite persistent rumours about him being a sexual predator and abuser.

In addition to hearing directly from Savile's victims, the stories of their abuse are dramatised in the four part show.

But even though great care has been taken by the makers of 'The Reckoning' in the way they depict events, is it enough? 

McKay begins his miniseries in Savile's apartment in Roundhay House in Leeds as he reflects on his life with the journalist Dan Davies, played by Mark Stanley.

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Davies doggedly tries throughout the show to prick the conscience and pierce the armour of a celebrity who remained an enigma despite being in the public eye for five decades.

Over the course of four episodes the journalist, whose 2014 book 'In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile' provided the foundations for McKay's drama, is engaged in a battle to get the broadcaster to admit to the truth in their interviews.

They spar like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling as Davies tries to get Steve Coogan's Savile to address rumours about abuse and explain how his creepy public comments about young women, sex and being a rogue square with his very public display of his supposedly devout Catholicism.

Savile ducks and weaves and talks in riddles until eventually in the third episode he snaps and shuts down the conversation.

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However Savile's vanity and his compulsion to show how he can outwit his accusers and his victims sees him re-engage Davies. 

Using the interviews with the journalist to frame the narrative arc of the miniseries, McKay charts Savile's rise from a Radio Luxembourg DJ playing discs to young people in dancehalls in Manchester to becoming a popular, eccentric BBC personality who was eventually awarded a knighthood.

From the off, we see Savile's vindictiveness away from the public gaze and his sleazy attitudes towards young women.

A bouncer is deployed by Savile to beat up a young man who has the temerity to slip into one of his DJ sets in Manchester in the early 1960s without paying.

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Working in tandem with Robert Emms' slimy disc jockey Ray Teret, they pluck two young women from the dancefloor and arrange for them to meet them in Savile's apartment where they are abused after he regales them with a tale about presenting Elvis with a gold disc in America.

Overawed by Savile's huge personality and ashamed by the assaults on them, the two victims decide not to talk to others about what they were subjected to.

To McKay's credit, some of the most disturbing scenes of abuse dramatised in 'The Reckoning' occur off camera.

When he does depict the abuse, he also avoids it getting too graphic while still making it terrifying.

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Audiences see one young girl in Leeds Infirmary get upset after Savile sits on her hospital bed and we know without actually seeing what he has done to her that she has been groped. 

In another, we witness a young woman in a wheelchair he is interviewing for his BBC radio show 'Savile's Travels' suddenly shift from excitement to discomfort and he withdraws his hand from under a table.

The abuse depicted is mostly very sensitively and subtly handled and in the scenes where we see Savile try to force himself on women or young girls, it is unequivocally repulsive. 

In all cases, the trauma experienced by the victims isn't sugarcoated.

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While Savile enjoys the status of a national treasure in the public gaze, his relentless pursuit of victims is depicted in a manner that is reminiscent of John McNaughton's grim 1986 movie 'Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer'.

While certainly not as graphic as McNaughton's film, 'The Reckoning' shares its foreboding atmosphere.

The grotty camper van he uses to travel the length and breadth of Britain to interview ordinary people for 'Savile's Travels' - some of whom he abused - only adds to that sense of foreboding.

The actors portraying Darien, Susan, Sam Brown and Kevin Cook at various stages of their lives - Eloise Thomas, Philippa Carson, Madeleine Edmondson, Tommy Finnegan, Terry Bird, Julie Edwards - do an impressive job portraying the trauma those victims experienced when they were assaulted and also later in life.

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But it also has to be said that Steve Coogan is brilliantly repulsive in his portrayal of Savile - perfectly capturing his malevolence, creepiness, arrogance, vanity, duplicity and hypocrisy.

As you would expect from a mimic of Coogan's talent, he sounds uncannily like Savile - so much so that many viewers may recoil in disgust when he first appears onscreen.

The actor shows how the DJ cloaked his true nature by adopting the public persona of a cheeky, fundraising Yorkshire eccentric.

However it is Coogan's willingness to embrace such an odious role that most impresses and it has to be admitted that he turns in the performance of his career.

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Fans of Coogan and possibly his detractors will detect some shared traits with his most famous comic creation, the DJ Alan Partridge - the vanity, the ego, the petty vindictiveness.

However he is much more harmful and evil and there are certainly no laughs to be had in 'The Reckoning' (nor should there be).

Savile's weird relationship with his mother, who he publicly worshipped as "The Duchess," is depicted as extremely complex.

As Savile's fame grows and he placates her by presenting the BBC1 religious show 'Songs of Praise' and receives an OBE, you sense he is grooming her as well as an entire nation into believing he's a great man. 

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In one scene, however, Gemma Jones' Agnes is depicted in a confessional box telling a priest that "a mother should love her child unconditionally but I don't".

And while this scene is purely speculative, there's a sense that deep down she really knows her son is up to no good.

Agnes isn't the only character who feels ambivalent about Savile.

Siobhan Finneran's Beryl Hulligan, an employee at Leeds Infirmary whose good hearted husband Mark Lewis Jones' Charlie is the head porter, quickly cops on that the showbiz personality is a creep.

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She even tells him to his face she thinks so on at least two occasions.

Yet despite having reservations about his behaviour towards nurses and patients, she can never quite prove he is an abuser and the couple even end up working for him, managing the finances for his fundraising activities.

Similarly at the Beeb, Barbara Wilshire's Anna Instone is seen tackling her fellow TV executive Michael Jibson's Bill Cotton about the concerns raised by women in the corporation about Savile's behaviour.

However these are dismissed, while Julian Rhind-Tutt's 'Top of the Pops' creator Johnnie Stewart glibly and rather disturbingly paints the star's activities "as a bit of harmless flirting around the studio but pop music's really about sex".

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An investigation into whether his behaviour at 'Top of the Pops' resulted in a teenager's suicide is unable to prove anything and only feeds Savile's arrogance as he hints in public on shows like David Frost's 'Through The Keyhole' that he's not to be trusted.

While there's a strong sense that the BBC is donning a sackcloth and ashes by turning a critical eye on the corporation in this drama, there is one notable huge hole at the heart of the miniseries - the bizarre decision to reduce the BBC's spiking of its current affairs show Newsnight's investigation into Savile to a mere caption.

This seems like an extraordinary omission because it shows how much senior BBC mandarins were aware of the brewing scandal around the star and were complicit in a cover up.

Nevertheless it has to be recognised that 'The Reckoning' isn't afraid to highlight other shortcomings of a corporation that lionised Savile following his death by broadcasting a tribute night to him.

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Admirers of Margaret Thatcher will no doubt feel queasy about scenes depicting Savile sweet talking Fenella Woolgar's Prime Minister and her enjoying having her ego stroked.

The Conservative leader's decision to award him a much coveted knighthood despite some of her aides' reservations leaves a bitter taste.

But so do the scenes of Pope John Paul II and the British Royal Family honouring him.

Faced with a hugely difficult task of dramatising the Savile story sensitively, McKay does a pretty good job navigating awkward territory.

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Goldbacher and Blair do a pretty decent job too handling their material with care and are greatly assisted by Ashley Rowe's cinematography which emphasises dark shades.

While Coogan delivers the show's tour de force performance, he is complemented by impressive supporting performances from Jones, Stanley, Finneran, Lewis-Jones, Emms, Woolgar, Wilshire, Jibson and Rhind-Tutt.

Neil Pearson pops up as the TV host and Miss World pageant creator Eric Morley, while Peter Wright portrays the ice cream vendor, Scarborough Mayor and paedophile associate of Savile's, Peter Jaconelli.

Ultimately, it is the testimonies of the four victims of Savile that hit home the hardest - particularly Darien's observations about the catastrophic impact of sexual abuse on those subjected to it for the rest of their lives.

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These interviews alone justify the making of 'The Reckoning,' ensuring that the voices of real victims aren't ignored or overshadowed by the drama.

Anyone who thinks ITV Studios, which has produced the drama for the BBC, has fashioned a piece of entertainment around the darkest chapter in British broadcasting and has soft soaped it needs to catch themselves on.

'The Reckoning' is an uncomfortable watch. It's not pleasurable.

It's an important warning, though, about the elevation of celebrities, the turning of blind eyes to their behaviour and the need to be wary of big personalities whose eccentricity seems too good to be true - themes that have also been raised recently in the Channel 4 Dispatches and Sunday Times programme about Russell Brand.

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The story of Savile's crimes are too horrific to be allowed to fade from memory.

It cannot be told enough, if only to serve as a warning.

Otherwise other monsters will emerge and destroy lives. 

But if it is to be told again, it must be told sensitively. 

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That's why the Netflix documentary 'Jimny Savile: A British Horror Story' has value and it's why 'The Reckoning' does as well.

If it's not for you, that's understandable.

Some topics are just too raw.

Don't watch this drama but don't forget the story that's at the heart of 'The Reckoning'.

We owe Savile's victims at least that.

('The Reckoning' was made available for streaming on the BBC iPlayer on October 9, 2023, with all four episodes broadcast on BBC1 between October 9-17, 2023)