Steve Coogan admits that he accepted the role of Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning “with great trepidation”. It's safe to say that viewers will approach the upcoming TV drama in a similar vein.
The Philomena actor was speaking at a press screening on Thursday, where assembled journalists sat down to watch the controversial four-parter – written by Four Lives and Appropriate Adult’s Neil McKay and executive produced by Jeff Pope – for the first time. The Reckoning, which airs on Monday, dramatises the life of the late TV personality, who, after his death in 2011, was revealed to have abused hundreds of young people, many of them minors, during his 50-year career as a DJ and presenter.
Th project met criticism as soon as it was announced in 2020 and was originally supposed to air last year. Then it was shifted to late-2023, supposedly so that it could receive the sensitive edit it deserved. Leaked set photos of Coogan in costume only inspired more questions about the need for such a dark and potentially triggering project, particularly with the victims in mind.
For Coogan, it was a case of the production team having faith in their motivations. “I knew there was the potential for catastrophic failure if you get it wrong, but that's not a reason not to do it. I felt comfortable that it was being made for the right reasons and if it achieves what it's supposed," he told the crowd. "It’s that kind of scrutiny that you get with drama you don’t get with a documentary, that meant that you could get under the skin of Jimmy Savile."
That's an incredibly tough ask in itself. With his famously eccentric manner, it's easy to see the performance as a high-wire act of convincingly inhabiting one of the most hated men in British culture without taking away from the solemnity of the horrific events. "I didn't really treat Jimmy Savile any differently from any other role insofar as I'm a professional being hired to do a job as professionally as possible," reasoned Coogan. "That means not do to something that has any kind of caricature or comedic content, neither to render him some kind of pantomime villain, which ultimately would be a disservice to the survivors of Savile."
"It wasn’t enjoyable," he concluded, grimly. "But it was a professional challenge I wanted to take on.”
The show – made by ITV Studios and broadcast on the BBC – chronicles Savile’s reign of terror as he utilised his celebrity status to assault children on the sets of series such as Top Of The Pops and Jim’ll Fix It. He also preyed on vulnerable patients at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Leeds General Infirmary and Broadmoor Hospital, and masked his crimes by dedicating his time to charity ventures, raising more than £40 million in his lifetime, and by infiltrating and befriending influential figures within the establishment, reaching from the UK government — he’s shown on the series spending Christmas at Chequers with Margaret Thatcher — to the Royal Family (he was an advisor to Prince Charles and was honoured with a knighthood from the Queen.)
The Reckoning is a highly uncomfortable watch, particularly in the case of a scene in the fourth and final episode, in which it is insinuated that Savile is committing sexual acts on a dead body in a morgue. “That was really disturbing [to film], what can you say?" remarked Coogan. "It’s as disturbing as it looks”. Were there any aspects of the original script that he simply refused to follow through with? “In that morgue scene there was a certain shot they wanted to do that I didn’t want to do, it was a detail that I wasn’t comfortable with," he told the crowd. "I had a conversation with the director and we came to an agreement on what was the most appropriate way to depict it.
“One of the creative tensions [of this series] is it just comes down to your opinion about what’s the right thing to do,” he added. “There’s the tension between showing too much of Savile’s offences, and it being grotesque, or sugar coating them, which is also wrong, so we don’t see the horror of what he did; so you have to strike the balance as you don’t want to upset survivors and you don’t want to anaesthetise the full effect and horror of what he did.”
The writer Neil McKay added: “If you think about Savile, it’s about power… and it’s the ultimate violation to do something like that, so it’s a decision the way it’s been edited and put together. We’ve found the right balance but I think it would have been wrong and untrue not to show it, not least because it’s all there in Savile’s writing, in his autobiographies.”
In all four episodes of The Reckoning, the real-life survivors of Savile appear before and after the dramatisation, and are given space to talk about their horrific experiences at the hands of a man who was celebrated as a national treasure, discussing how he got away with it. The survivors were also involved in most aspects of the series, and watched Coogan act the part on set.
However, the title is something of a misnomer. Savile, who died in 2011, passed on without ever being held accountable for his many heinous crimes. The series seems to suggest that grappling with his religious beliefs and what would happen in the afterlife gave him cause for troubled concern, but whether that will be of any comfort to his many victims is questionable. As the story concludes with his death, fingers crossed and a roll of banknotes in his possession, there’s the lasting sense that he got away with it all.
The BBC famously shelved the Newsnight programme that was set to expose Savile in 2011 (a decision later called “flawed” in a review of the BBC’s handling of the case; in the series this is just mentioned as a footnote of text before the credits). It was ITV’s Exposure: The Other Side Of Jimmy Savile in 2012 that revealed his six decades-long abuse to the public, leading to the Met Police to state that it was dealing with 400 lines of inquiry with more than 300 potential victims. It was abuse “on an unprecedented scale”, the force said, and the number of potential victims was “staggering”.
While many may question why The Reckoning needed to be made at all, McKay explained that it was to give a “warning from history” and to provide some sort of catharsis to the survivors. “What the survivors have said to us is that he got to the grave right before he had any justice, but they feel this is a posthumous trial of Jimmy Savile, now he’s gone.
“To some people they might feel it’s useless, but to the survivors, it isn’t and it mattered that we have told the story through to the last moment and the essence of what we’re trying to do is to put him on trial, posthumously, and not for no good reason.”
The Reckoning begins on BBC One on Monday 9 October at 9pm.
