However, the review led by Dame Janet Smith into the BBC and Savile describes a sexual assault carried out by the then 79-year-old presenter on an employee during rehearsals ( I reported that incident to the BBC in 2006), while a separate Scotland Yard investigation revealed a sexual assault on a child during the recording. In a scene at the final Top of the Pops recording in 2006, the arc of the drama requires Savile to be a broken and bitter old man, furious at being a BBC bit-player. Indulgence of the presenter is effectively blamed on the ratings greed of Sir Bill Cotton, the BBC boss who, perhaps conveniently, has been dead longer than Savile. Those investigations did take place but their space and power within the scripts may leave the impression that the BBC was more rigorous than many suspect. Managers are shown trying to bring Savile to account in the 60s and 70s, but are thwarted by his lies and lawyers. In contrast, the BBC seems to get a less severe reckoning. In order, the institutions most discomfited by the drama will be the NHS, the Thatcherite Conservative party and the Roman Catholic church: two sexual assaults take place in a vestry during mass to a soundtrack of eucharistic prayers. The Reckoning is impeccable as far as it goes, but its reception will be defined by debate over those parameters. It fulfils their aim to show Savile from the inside, with particular emphasis on his warped Catholicism, and how powerful people dupe institutions. Technically, The Reckoning is an independent production by ITV Studios, with McKay and Pope denying any censorship. Others think the BBC, which funded Savile’s rise and failed to prevent him offending, should not have been the ones to make it. Some think the drama should never have been made at all. It helps that writer Neil McKay and executive producer Jeff Pope are TV’s supreme court of criminal judgment, having previously brought Peter Sutcliffe, Fred West, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady to their dock. Director Sandra Goldbacher and producer Clare Shepherd never allow the camera to be a voyeur: what Savile has done to the young victims is implied by shocked or tearful faces. The hint of the latter is inevitably one of the bleakest and most startling scenes in TV drama, but it is handled with visual decorum, as are the sexual assaults. Savile’s Chequers seduction of the country’s top politician (who eventually gave him the knighthood he craved) serves as a broader metaphor for how the platinum-haired Yorkshireman groomed and used a prince (now king), a pope (who granted Savile a separate Vatican knighthood), BBC managers (who signed him up to Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It) and NHS bosses, who allowed him the run of their wards to indulge in paedophilia and morgues for necrophilia. The performance deserves multiple awards, though Coogan may not get them as jurors may balk at being seen to give an award “to” Savile. He also reproduces, with physiological accuracy rather than caricature, the curious hopping-loping walk and bent-double pounce to kiss a woman’s hand, arm and wherever else he could. Wigs, latex and putty allow Coogan to spookily reproduce Savile at six stages of depravity, but it is the actor’s ear that astonishes, musically notating the differences between on-air and off-air speech and their thickening with age, rage and, eventually, booze. 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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