THE RECKONING - bbc 1 mon 9th - 9pm and Tue - TV PACE NO SPOILERS

[Blondeshavemorefun]

There will be four episodes in total, with the second airing at 9pm on Tuesday, October 10.

The third and fourth episodes are likely to air on the following Monday and Tuesday.

The Reckoning stars Steve Coogan as Savile and has spent a long time in production, with a planned release in 2022 reportedly being delayed due to the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

It will trace the life of Savile from a working-class background to one of the biggest stars in television and will also focus on his years of sexual abuse and the impact he had on his victims.

Saville (https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/national/uk-today/23729749.bbc-reveal-first-official-image-steve-coogan-jimmy-savile/)
died in October 2011 aged 84 having never been brought to justice for his crimes.

By not talking about it, you don’t get to the nub of that and if you don’t look at it you’re destined for those things to happen again.

The drama answers the question: how did he get away with it?

"The drama answers that question which is a very important one."
The series will also feature interviews with four of Savile's victims.

He's brilliant. I thought he was really good in the Laurel & Hardy film too. He is so versatile.

Watched episode 2. What were those parents thinking of?!

And the poor girl that committed suicide and Savile only interested in covering his tracks. The whole thing is shocking.

I have been gripped by this. Repeating again how amazing Steve Coogan is - the thing with him is that I think it has made me realise how much of a mask/act JS had. When I was watching the real JS I thought Ewww but with this I see it all more clearly- the swaggering walk, the fake short phrases "fun fun fun" , the dead eyes , the way he closed down questions etc. There are scenes that have just made my skin crawl from the very first episode - as someone else mentioned the jester outfit. It is the sheer contrast of it.

I was a teen in the 1960s and know how easy it must have been for famous people to have access to so many young women and yes I also know what young women could be like with pop stars etc. It was a totally different world. No phones, no SM - we were moving out of what seemed the dull world of our parents to this wonderful fun, music crazy time. Young girls were more innocent than now. There was no abortion pre 1967, there were no morning after pills. There was no discussions of mental health - heck some of us barely knew anything about sex. We had no internet to go to. I have to guess then that this also affected the institutions that he worked with - he was seen as zany, a bit off by some/many but maybe part of this new world. People were used to very conservative TV presenters and suddenly we were in this new space. I am stunned looking at this as to how far his reach extended.

My son mentioned him to his online American gaming friends, posting a picture. They fell about laughing, all saying variations of "What! How could you not see that this guy was a paedophile? It's so obvious!"

I'm not sure what the point of posting this is ⬆

Clearly it wasn't "so obvious" back then.
They were very, very different times, as posters like @bronkie have so carefully described. Especially this: "he was seen as zany, a bit off by some/many but maybe part of this new world. People were used to very conservative TV presenters and suddenly we were in this new space."

Your son's friends can be excused from not understanding given that they're presumably young, brought up in an online world with awareness of paedophiles, and not from the UK so lack the context of JS as a huge media figure for several decades. Glad they had a good laugh though.

Yes Hindsight is,a,wonderful thing 🙄

I wonder how they feel about Michael Jackson.....

Yes, I was a teenager in the 60s and the world changed a lot between my gentle upbringing of the 1950s and Kerpow, the Swinging Sixties.
There were groupies - young women mostly, and possibly some under the age of consent, who consented to having sex with pop singers etc. No, I am not talking about younger girls in this paragraph. Don't misunderstand me. But the culture of available young women was there. By the latish 60s, a few girls at college, over 18, were on the pill. That meant they could feel that they had a freedom which their mothers and all women before them, hadn't had.

Wiki told me that JS wrote an autobiography in which he said he had sex with umpteen women in umpteen places, so do I take it that he did indeed have sex with over-age, consenting women, as well as pursuing and abusing the children?

I don’t think it was obvious at all.
I know several people who have run marathons with JS. Not one of them thought he was a sex pest.
When all his past came out they were shocked by it. They assumed he was a bit odd, but did a lot for charity and that his heart was in the right place.

@upinaballoon yes he did admit this.

I loved Jim’ll Fix IT - all my friends etc were obsessed with the programme and I had no idea that JS was anything more than a wacky guy. It’s madness to look back and makes me feel really uncomfortable that I actually enjoyed watching him (and I also loved Rolf 🤦‍♀️)
Sadly I do know of a few men who have been convicted of paedophilia - I’d say I’ve met 2 in recent years - both teachers and they had no vibes around them. One was someone I met in my early 20s at a party and again, no vibes, so I think it isn’t always obvious.

On modern eyes and with the benefit of knowing his crimes it’s easy for young people to say of course he was a paedophile, but back in the day a lot of popular pop stars look decidedly odd, look at the members of Slade or Sweet for example, JS blended in with that look at the time, as he got older and that aesthetic became unfashionable JS didn’t move with the times and he then began to look odd, eccentric and a bit creepy.

About to start watching this. Have read how well Coogan plays him and rate Coogan highly.

Sorry I missed your call @Blondeshavemorefun. That is my old name, I add the year each new year. But thanks for remembering me! I'm in!

I just didn't like his whacky,tacky image with his shiny cheap clothes, his awful hair and medallions and a cigar hanging out of his mouth or hand. His catchphrase "Now then, now then...."
I just couldn't see the appeal.

And that awful laugh or that sound he made on Jim'll fix it

Hard to describe

Ah. I will change for next one

His bizarre dress, zany fake persona, innuendo banter, catch phrases, etc is not dissimilar to Russel Brands MO - both people who are so hyper and unable to dialogue - they just monologue in order to keep control of the conversation and keep moving on with no authenticity or emotional intimacy.

As this piqued my interest, I watched a tribute, 'Sir Jimmy Savile: As It Happened', that was on the BBC the year Jimmy Savile died. It was narrated by Chris Evans with loads of celebs of the day praising him no end.

It hasn't really aged well 😂

'they just monologue in order to keep control of the conversation' - yes, I must pay more attention but I'm thinking when we see the real-life bits of footage he is always the one making the noise, the first words.....

Auntie Thatcher could do it, too. When they spent time together I wonder which one got a word in.

I had no idea what he was, I watched Jim’ll Fix It as a child and can’t remember having any negative/positive thoughts of him but enjoyed the premise of the show. I remember having a conversation with my mother when he died, just along the lines of how sad, he was eccentric but did a lot for charity. I’m sure that most of the public had no idea that he was such a disgusting pervert. He was definitely viewed as an oddball but most people would have no idea about the abuse.

As part of a job I do I reviewed the show this week. I made this point about Russell Brand in it. I think that it's a very valid point and further emphasises why this needed to be made. The article from the LRB is well worth a read too.

This is the extract:

Last month, when the accusations about Russell Brand's various sexual misconducts some while on the payroll at the BBC- -were laid bare in another TV documentary expose, I thought about the Brand of the mid-noughties. I will admit that I was a huge fan of Russell Brand back then, with his mad hair, madcap antics, and mad leatherette trousers. As the accusations led to further accusations, I thought of his eccentric, jester-like clothing back when he first hit the comedy scene and of his verbal affectations, all so funny, but even at the time, all so weird. I remembered too, something that I had read by Andrew O'Hagan in the
"London Review of Books' back in 2012, a piece called
"Light Entertainment' (https://www.Irb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n21/andrew-o-hagan/light-entertainment), which described a certain television personality:

'Let's blame him for all the things he obviously was and blame him for a host of other things we don't understand, such as how we love freaks and how we select and protect people who are 'eccentric' in order to feed our need for disorder... [because] no one said, not out loud, 'What's wrong with that man? Why is he going on like that? What is he up to? ' He was an entertainer, and that's thought to be special.'

O'Hangan was writing about Savile in 2012, but he might as well have been discussing Brand in 2023.

Thanks Blondie. I'll probably give this a watch even though it's been done to death a bit x

Exactly!

As you say, different times. Even within that, children have different lives.

People will probably find this hard to believe, but I grew up in a VERY sheltered way. My mother was quite antisocial and fell out with her family when I was about 7. We had no visitors and visited no-one. I grew up in rural Scotland, no neighbours. I was quite strictly brought up. Apart from school and the odd trip to the shops, we went nowhere. I could not have been been more of a "babe in the woods".

If there were programmes about paedophiles on TV back then, I certainly wasn't allowed to watch them. But I don't think there were anyway.

I had no idea what a paedophile was until I was an adult!

I loved JS and RH back in the day. I had no idea, because I never knew there was such a thing.

When I reached my early 20s, I did some silly risky things out of sheer naivety.

I was a child in the 70s and a teen in the 80s, BTW.