The BBC has broadcast The Reckoning, a four part drama about the life and crimes of Jimmy Savile. It got some angry responses before it was on, with, for example, Pragya Agarwal writing in The Independent:
It […] feels insidiously callous and thoughtless that an organisation that played a role in glorifying a sex offender and profiting from him, while covering up his actions for many decades, are once again capitalising on his “brand” and the fascination that viewers have with monsters and true crime.
It is neither “sensitive” nor “complex”, but relatively simple. This series is a bad idea – and is being made at the emotional expense of all the people who were once abused by this very man. Their worst nightmares are being brought to life on screen, to be enjoyed by millions – and creating entertainment from the loss of their childhoods, dignity and self-respect.
Richard Morrison wrote in the Times that:
When a famous man (it’s overwhelmingly men) is exposed as a serial abuser on a vast scale, there’s an argument for saying that their names should be erased from human discourse as soon as possible, not memorialised in films and TV docudramas.
a view that Morrison endorses, urging ‘Tim Davie should think again about the BBC’s Jimmy Savile drama’, adding ‘I wish the BBC had never embarked on this sordid project’.
The series was made in 2021 and the BBC appears to have been uncertain about how to schedule it, hesitating before broadcasting it in 2022, pushing it back to 2024, then bringing it forward to last month. As it was going out, the BBC received more flack from commentators, for supposedly letting the BBC off the hook, even though the production was made by ITV Studios, precisely to avoid any accusations of a whitewash.
But it’s now out and I watched it. The first thing to say is that I think it’s a very serious piece of work, telling a horrific, upsetting and disturbing story with tact and restraint, making quite clear the horror of Savile’s crimes, but never dwelling unnecessarily on the acts themselves. The aim of the drama, I’d say, was to show how Savile organised his life, persona and reputation so that he could perpetrate so many crimes and get away with it. It also allowed us to speculate - because that is really all we can do - about his mental state, the things driving him, and how far he understood that he was doing wrong.
The keystone of the production is Steve Coogan. It’s hard to think of anyone else who could have pulled off this performance; Coogan started as an impressionist, including of Savile, but became a major comic actor. He has both the chameleon ability to become Savile and the power to manifest Savile’s unpleasantly malevolent charisma. He plays Savile as someone with impenetrable self-confidence that fractures only slightly in the later years though still remains a kind of iron fortress around his personality. Watching it I was very struck how the enormously eccentric performance of self that Savile’s maintained throughout his life - the peculiar hair, the catchphrases, the cigars, the jewellery, the tracksuits, the scrupulously maintained accent, the attitudes - were both a smokescreen and a distraction. There was so much noise to Savile’s signal; he seemed so weird that it was hard to spot his actual weirdness. (That said, when people who gave him a platform claimed to know nothing about his sexual secrets, I am reminded that in the playground, aged 10, it was widely said that Savile was a paedophile and we didn’t say that about every tv star, just him. How did we know that — if we did, strictly. know that — and his bosses not?)
And then the moral and emotional heart of the production are the survivors, a few of whom are given space and time to bear witness to their own awful treatment at Savile’s hands, both in first-person testimony and as figures in the drama, where we see them shattered by Savile’s reappearance on TV and finding themselves having to relive their abuse, some of them resolving finally to come forward. Those moments are perhaps a hint at another of the drama’s social ambitions. While Agarwal suggested - years before the broadcast - that such a drama would be merely triggering for the survivors, The Reckoning is maybe suggesting here that by laying bare the horrific strategies of an impenitent serial abuser, it might embolden survivors of other abusers to come forward. I hope that works.
This feels like a difficult time for drama-documentaries like this. We are, I would suggest, is a slightly fiction-averse world, where people, for various reasons, many of them good, wish to assert the right to tell their own stories and not have other people tell those stories for them. This is evidently a response to the way that stories by the marginalised have been taken and retold by the powerful in ways that perhaps misrepresent those stories. In particular people of colour have found their stories twisted into shapes that relieve white people of responsibility for their oppression, or tell those stories through white saviours, and so on. For those reasons, there is - rightly - a demand that people of colour should be given space to find ways of telling their stories. But this can also be generalised - wrongly, in my view - into a view that we can only ever tell our own stories, that all storytelling should be personal testimony (‘speaking my truth’), and that there is something monstrous about the very idea of fiction. Now, these views don’t seem to have stopped people making fictional films, TV, or theatre, though there’s been a lot more autobiographical work in the theatre than I remember from a decade ago. But where I think it does manifest quite significantly is in the uneasiness that people have about a show like The Reckoning, where there is a presumption - as witnessed by the two commentators who were able to form a judgment of the show before seeing it - that the very idea of making a drama-documentary about Jimmy Savile must be a ‘sordid project’.
I think this betrays a certain philistinism about art. The idea seems to be lurking here that there are certain topics that are too serious and important for art - implicitly frivolous and trivial - to address. And perhaps it is specifically fiction that is the concern here: creating fictions, telling tales, making stories, isn’t this all essentially lying? Hence the current wish to extract the poison of fiction by making everything authentically personal. Our Puritan history still bears on the present. But I think this massively underestimates the value, power and scope of dramatic storytelling and the insights, the complexity, the perspective that it can bring to any subject, any event, any horror.
I thought of this watching the final episode. The drama is called The Reckoning and it is in the final episode that we understand why. The walls are closing in around Savile; his protective celebrity is beginning to fray; he seems to lose control of his rigorous secrecy, almost, it seems, wanting to confess; accusations are made and he is interviewed by the police; and his interviewer (the drama is sort of threaded through a writer interviewing Savile for a biography) loses his patience with Savile’s evasions and Savile, desperate for attention, promises he will tell all but dies before he can make good on that promise. The impression given is that, before his death, Savile did know that his crimes would catch up with him, that the game was up.
The biography was written. Dan Davies’s In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (Quercus, 2014) was quickly acclaimed for its meticulous investigation of this deeply mysterious and unpleasant man. I read it soon after it came out and … well… I can’t say I enjoyed it, but it was a very powerful account that began to make sense of this terrifying enigma. Now, at least as I read it, Dan Davies was not nearly as heroic in confronting Savile as he appears in The Reckoning. In the book, it is clear that he did repeatedly challenge Savile about the circulating rumours (as did Louis Theroux, briefly, in his 2000 documentary), but in the TV show Davies loses his rag and announces that he’s had enough and is leaving, never to return. This, in turn, shocks Savile, who under the guise of holding court actually has a desperate need for attention, even maybe companionship and, humbled, old and broken, promises to tell his biographer everything. As far said I read the book, this never happened.
But is that wrong? Even if it did not happen, even if there is no proof that Savile ended his days a terrified, lonely man, desperate to confess, petrified of damnation, haunted by his thousands of evil acts, was The Reckoning not right to believe that the Catholic Savile must have seen death approaching with fear? Stripped of his celebrity, isolated by own misanthropy, dislikeability and fastidious peculiarity, are we not entitled to wonder if he was tortured by his own twisted memories? I know it’s easy to think that a man capable of committing those acts might have sufficient sociopathy to protect him from guilt, but that is maybe to fall into the trap that when we see these people as monsters because of their acts, we absolve ourselves of any need to understand them. If they are monsters, there is nothing to say about the. They are nothing like us. But isn’t it more terrible, more unsettling to acknowledge that Savile was a human being, like us? Even typing those words makes me shudder.
Which is why, when people say that reality is stranger than fiction, first I tend to think ‘then you haven’t been reading the right fiction’, but second, and more important, I really believe sometimes fiction can be more truthful than reality.