Steve Coogan and The Reckoning creators on their Jimmy Savile drama: ‘There was the potential for catastrophic failure if we got it wrong’

When Jimmy Savile was found dead in his Leeds flat in 2011, those who discovered him noticed the most peculiar thing: his fingers were crossed. It would be revealed in the months and years afterwards that this was a man who had, over the course of six decades, sexually abused hundreds of children and women. He had used his position as one of the BBC’s top entertainers, and his connections in the church, the NHS, the royal family and the government, to facilitate and conceal his crimes. He had hidden in plain sight, hinting at his actions in numerous interviews and autobiographies, but had gone to the grave without trial. Having been raised in a deeply Catholic setting, he constantly tried to mitigate for – and distract from – his mortal sins with his charity work. If he crossed his fingers tight enough, in his final moments, would he be granted access to heaven?

Savile is at the centre of BBC One’s sweeping new drama, The Reckoning, which charts the paedophile’s life and crimes, from his early days as a disc jockey in Manchester dancehalls to his lonely death aged 84. Steve Coogan plays the bleach-blonde, shell suit-wearing predator, in a series from true-crime veterans Neil McKay and Jeff Pope. Scenes of the presenter’s depravity are interspliced with combative interviews between Savile and the author of In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, Dan Davies (played by Mark Stanley), who, out of every journalist that spoke to the man, probably got closest to the truth. And, although the show is a drama, real survivors of Savile – Darien, Kevin, Sam and Susan – are interviewed on camera, their harrowing stories brought to life.

In 2020, when the BBC announced the drama, criticism was fierce. “Who needs to see this misery?” was the reaction of many online commentators. A detective, Gary Pankhurst, who had investigated Savile as part of Operation Yewtree, later called for the show to be axed, branding it “tone deaf”. He said it was “not the BBC’s story to tell”, adding: “The reality is that it will distress a lot of people, so it’s unnecessary. It makes me very uneasy. Morally and ethically, the better position to take would be to just withdraw it.”

But of course, that hasn’t happened; the drama will air on Monday, and at the press screening, the show’s writer McKay emphasised that many survivors supported it. “The defining moment for me with this,” he says, “was going to see [survivor] Sam Brown at her house, sitting in her front room with her daughter and her dog beside her on the sofa, and her telling me about her experiences at Savile’s hands, but also her experiences prior to that [Sam had been the victim of previous abuse by other adults]. She has devoted her life to serving as a warning about this kind of behaviour. And so it was the knowledge that she was behind us, and then one by one meeting the others [that made us want to make it].”

He says that it’s “essential” for him that the drama gives a platform to “ordinary people” and the “unheard voices” of the victims. “If they felt I failed, then however it’s received [by the press and the public] wouldn’t have mattered to me.”

Coogan also defends the decision to make a drama about Savile, rather than a documentary. “[Drama] means that you can get under the skin of Jimmy Savile, and the reason that that’s a good thing to do, to bring him to life again, is to learn about how this has happened, to stop it happening again and to see how he operates. To illuminate things that you can’t with witness testimony or public inquiries and all the rest of it.” It’s something collaborators McKay and Pope have previously done with dramas about killers Fred West (Appropriate Adult) and Stephen Port (Four Lives).

The Reckoning’s richly observed set design and bold performances will likely be lauded. Watching it, it feels like you are stepping out onto the fish-and-chips-scattered coast of Seventies Scarborough, where Savile had a home, or the gaudy set of Top of the Pops. And Coogan is pitch-perfect – he captures Savile’s eccentricity and evasiveness, endlessly repeating his line that all he’s up to is “fun, fun, fun” and “bringing sunshine into children’s lives”. But many will baulk at the dramatic licence taken in scenes in the confession booth: at one point, Savile is shown confiding in a priest on behalf of “a friend” who has committed “sins of the flesh” by “forcing himself on children”, and at another, his mother Agnes admits to the priest that she worries there’s a “terrible darkness” in her son because she didn’t love him enough.

Critics will also say that The Reckoning – a drama commissioned by the BBC but made by independent ITV studios – doesn’t go far enough to hold the BBC to account. While the series presents much of what was found in the Dame Janet Smith Review – BBC executives continuing to promote and reward Savile despite the rumours about his behaviour around young girls, and warnings from women in the corporation such as Anna Instone, who says she “wouldn’t touch Savile with a bargepole” – there is no proper interrogation of the corporation’s failings. The BBC’s decision after Savile’s death to scrap a Newsnight investigation into his crimes and replace it with a glowing tribute to him is also only briefly mentioned in postscript.

“We were very aware, very quickly, that our reputations were on the line because this couldn’t be seen to be the BBC marking its own homework,” says Pope. “All I can do is sit here and say, honestly – and Neil will say the same – that there wasn’t any part of the process where we felt censored, or put under pressure to make changes to go lighter on the BBC. We made exactly the story that we wanted to make, and what the BBC did, quite rightly, as any broadcaster would, is challenge us and say, ‘OK, if you’re going to show that, why? Where’s the evidence for that?’ But that’s a normal part of the rigour of making these kinds of pieces.”

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Pope insists that the team did not “ignore” the Newsnight scandal, but that the main focus of the drama was on the years leading up to Savile’s death, instead. “I do think that we hold the BBC to account, and it was a disastrous decision, in my opinion, to not proceed with Newsnight and to instead show the tribute to Savile, but I honestly do think we did deal with that, it’s there. You’ve got two of the victims saying this was disgraceful.”

“I don’t think that anyone watching this would think, ‘Oh, going back to the Seventies and Eighties, the BBC come out of this smelling of roses,’” he adds. “There wasn’t any, ‘Let’s not put that in because that’s awkward.’”

Charlotte Moore, chief content officer at the BBC, says the drama does not “shy away” from the BBC’s part in Savile’s crimes. “It’s very clear throughout, I think, that there were people saying, ‘We’re not sure this man should be given these roles’, and yet we show that despite that, he continues to be at the BBC, going from Top of the Pops to Jim’ll Fix It to a religious programme.”

Why, with all this potential for controversy, did Coogan take the role? “I felt like there were probably a handful of people in the country who could play the part, and I did consider myself one of them,” he says. Decades ago, Coogan had impersonated Savile in comedy sketches. “But I had great trepidation about it, obviously. Jeff [Pope] mentioned it to me first and I trust Jeff, as a writer and as a human being.” Later, he says, “I knew there was the potential for catastrophic failure if we got it wrong, but that’s not a reason not to do it. So I moved forward with it, and I felt comfortable that it was being made for the right reasons.”

Coogan, who had six different makeup and prosthetic looks for six different time periods, says he wanted to show both sides of Savile and “did not want to do something that has any kind of caricature or comedic content”. “To understand how [the abuse] happened, you have to show the things that, perhaps initially, seem counterintuitive, which is to show that he was charismatic, undoubtedly. Because that was part of the trojan horse that he created, to go about his sexual assaults.”

The actor speaks openly about “creative tensions” on the set. “It’s been two years to bring this to the screen and the reason it’s taken so long isn’t because anyone got cold feet, it’s because of diligent forensic application about trying to make sure all the right decisions are made,” he says. “One of the creative tensions – and there’s no right or wrong answer, it just comes down to your opinion about what’s the right thing to do – is between showing too much of Savile’s offences and it being grotesque, and sugar-coating them, which is also wrong, so that we don’t see the horror of what he did. You have to strike that balance. You don’t want to upset survivors and you don’t want to anaesthetise the full horror of what he did. And in depicting his charity work, we run the risk of elevating him inadvertently, but if you just show him as a pantomime villain, it’s also a disservice.”

One scene that there was “a lot of discussion about” comes in episode four of the drama: Savile is shown groping the corpse of a woman at Leeds General Infirmary (Savile’s crimes weren’t only against the living – he would boast about performing sex acts on dead bodies). The audience sees him sneak into the room where she is lying, before the camera cuts away; when it returns, viewers see that his hand is under the sheet. A member of hospital staff then comes in and tells him to get out. “It was really disturbing, what can you say?” says Coogan as he recalls filming the sequence. “It’s as disturbing as it looks.” Explaining that he and the team “came to a collective agreement on it”, he says, “In that morgue scene, there was a certain shot they wanted to do that I didn’t want to do. It was just a detail that I was uncomfortable with, so I had a conversation with the director and we came to an agreement on what was the most appropriate way to depict it.”

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McKay says he had “excellent” sources informing that scene. “The mortuary was literally next to the chapel, and Savile had a bedroom two stairways up, and he spent a lot of time in that area. In terms of that morgue scene, you don’t want to cause distress or show something that’s grim. But in the end, if you think about Savile, it’s about power, and anybody who’s seen or witnessed a dead relative, when you look at them, you think, ‘Somebody needs to look after that person because they can’t do it for themselves anymore.’ It’s the ultimate violation, I think, to do something like that. So it was a decision and, you know, the way it’s been edited and put together, we think we found the right balance, but I think it would have been wrong and untrue to not show it. Not least because it’s all there in Savile’s own writing.”

The Reckoning can sometimes feel, uncomfortably, like a beautifully lit road trip through Savile’s horrific crimes. As Nick Hilton notes in his review for The Independent, “any time a young woman is introduced, even fleetingly, to the narrative, you can all but guarantee what will happen next”. But the abuse is broken up with scenes between Savile and Dan Davies, who spent several years interviewing the entertainer in the 2000s and even went on a cruise with him. “We were working out how to wrestle the story down to the ground,” says Pope, explaining that Savile would hint at the truth with Davies in the same way he did with other journalists, from Louis Theroux to Lynne Barber. “Savile’s technique is to kind of say it, almost, to say what he’s doing. He’d go on a game show and say, ‘I’m feared in every girl’s school in the country.’ So when we spoke to Dan, we realised that that really was the story of his time with Savile. Savile seemed to take great delight in dangling [the truth] under the nose of people like Dan Davies, and then whipping it away.”

The Reckoning also interrogates Savile’s strange relationship with his mother, Agnes, whom he called “the duchess”. It depicts Savile as being desperate to please this ambivalent, devoutly Catholic woman, who is shown at the start of the drama willing him to do something useful with his life. Her coldness towards him only starts to thaw when he gets a knighthood and appears on the BBC’s Songs of Praise. “He was her seventh child,” says McKay. “There was no abortion in 1926 when she gave birth to him and anyway, she was a Catholic – she couldn’t get rid of him. He referred to himself all the time as a ‘not again child’. Unwanted.”

But it’s Savile’s survivors who have the last words in the drama. According to McKay, they see the series as Savile’s posthumous trial. In the final moments, Darien – whom Savile preyed upon at a children’s disco – is seen tearfully telling the camera, “Most children who are abused carry the guilt for the rest of their lives. It really messes with their lives. Don’t let this ever happen again. Don’t. Please.”

‘The Reckoning’ will air on BBC One at 9pm on Monday 9 October

If you are a child and you need help because something has happened to you, you can call the NSPCC free of charge on 0800 1111. You can also call the NSPCC if you are an adult and you are worried about a child, on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adults on 0808 801 0331