Steve Coogan’s take on the serial sex offender is astonishingly spooky. But questions remain as to whether it should have been made – and whether the BBC has given itself too easy a ride

 

 

There were no cameraphones when Margaret Thatcher spent Christmas Day at Chequers with Jimmy Savile in the 1980s. But the BBC’s controversial and much anticipated Savile drama The Reckoning serves as a sort of historical Instagram, bringing vivid and intimate pictures from the kitchen and halls of the prime ministerial retreat.

With Steve Coogan’s cunningly unctuous Savile and Fenella Woolgar’s icily strategic Thatcher matching each other for full body-capture acting, these superb scenes in the third of the four hour-long episodes illustrate how the prime minister so fell for Savile that she placed a serial sex offender in charge of Broadmoor psychiatric hospital.

 

Bookended by reality interviews with four Savile survivors (Darien, Susan, Sam and Kevin), the four episodes cover the years from 1962 to 2011, requiring the 57-year-old Coogan to age down 21 years and up 27 to portray Savile from northern dancehall DJ to corpse.

 

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He looked creepy

As a kid I met Saville at least a dozen times as my Dad used to take me to watch wrestling on a monday and he was often on the bill looking back I'm kind of glad I wasn't a girl and only got autographs from the pervert ????

Somebody from Leeds like Saville told me what he was up to- in 1975! So it was common knowledge by then. Protected by his contacts in the media, the police, politicians and royalty.