As the curtains close on The Reckoning (BBC One, Tuesday, 9pm), it is still not clear what the BBC hoped to achieve with its dramatisation of the life and crimes of Jimmy Savile. There is no meaningful effort to engage with the multiple cover-ups – at the broadcaster and at the hospitals and other institutions where he volunteered – which allowed him to prey on vulnerable people for decades. Instead, the focus is on Savile: monster, freak, degenerate.
But this portrayal lacks insight – we already knew Savile (played by Steve Coogan) was a ghastly human being. All The Reckoning does is fill in the blanks. It does not expand our understanding of what was obviously a rotten culture within the BBC or of a Britain that let him abuse with impunity children and people deemed to be on the fringes of society.
The final episode focuses on Savile’s later years and his decline into angry irrelevance. By now, his behaviour is an open secret. At a hospital, a nurse fends off his advances and labels him a “dirty old man”. An orderly disturbs Savile as he looms over a corpse with terrifying intent (Coogan is said to have found the scene challenging).
With the end nearing, The Reckoning circles back to its ongoing obsession with Savile’s Catholicism. Conferring the last rites after the latest in a series of health scares, a priest wonders if Savile might like to get anything off his chest. His friend Charlie Hullighan (Mark Lewis Jones), former head porter at Leeds Royal Infirmary, listens to Savile’s protestations that the rumours about him are untrue and then asks why his friend “looks so scared”.
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Times had changed, yet Savile had not. Then, there is a familiar trajectory for broadcasters of a particular vintage. You are beloved until the day television moves on. At which point, you’re on the scrap heap. It says a lot about Savile that he is more concerned about his declining influence at the BBC – he is outraged to barely feature in the farewell episode of Top of the Pops – than with making peace with his sins.
Coogan is earnest and unshowy in a difficult part. In the run-up to The Reckoning, many wondered if his Savile might contain distracting traces of his comedy creation Alan Partridge: another broadcaster chucked on the light entertainment compost heap and unable to climb out. Yet, Coogan ducks out of the way of his best-known alter-ego: you see only Savile, not Coogan, in make-up and a dodgy shell suit.
The Reckoning ends, as it began, with the testimony of victims of Savile. Upon hearing of his death, one woman says her immediate feeling was joy. That gave way to anger and frustration that he had escaped justice, however. Still, judgment of a sort had finally come: in a haunting final shot, we see his grave in Leeds, stripped of its headstone. It is a fitting coda: it’s a just shame The Reckoning doesn’t devote more time to the conspiracy of silence that permitted Savile to escape retribution until it was too late.
