The Reckoning: Jimmy Savile - BBC1 9 Oct SPOILERS

[YokoOnosBigHat]

I couldn't see a thread for the five part drama The Reckoning starring Steve Coogan as Jimmy Savile, so thought I'd start one.

I'm in bed with Covid so have decided to start watching. Half an hour into the first episode and I can safely already say that Coogan's performance is extraordinary. The voice, the mannerisms, they're amazing.

For anyone interested and who isn't familiar, the framing device of Savile telling his life story for an author interested in writing a book is based around Dan Davies's research for his account 'In Plain Sight'. Well worth a read for anyone who wants to know more about how the establishment wilfully ignored what was going on right under their noses.

Interesting article on the drama by Mark Lawson for The Guardian here and Lawson's account of how he tried and failed to report Savile at the BBC in 2006 here.

Look forward to discussing this all. Have marked it as spoilers as all parts are on iPlayer and are there really any spoilers possible for this story?!

I can guarantee there is £20K left to exhume and cremate Savile, he appears to have been a wealthy and frugal man.

However, I think his relatives either don’t want the publicity around it or to spend the money having it done. I’m also guessing at some level they knew he was up to no good but just chose to ignore it. Maybe it was nice to have a famous sibling/aunt/uncle. I think or I’ve seen online that some his relatives think he’s innocent too.

For those interested, watching "An English Horror Story" on Netflix has interviews with the Funeral Director. They removed the stone at night and then carved off the lettering back at the yard. I wonder if that means they reused the marble?

Whatever happened to that woman who claimed to be his daughter shortly after he died? She was the double of him.

Yes I remember her I imagine she is/ was horrified by the revelation, s
I saw a clip.on you tube last year of some family members being interviewed on this morning ,just as the first rumblings of the truth wss string to come out ,they were adamant non of it was true and im.sure they said he had a long term partner ?

I get this, but it's one programme that could be avoided . Whereas Jackson, Bowie etc are all still out there on tv and film ready to catch people unawares. There's a very definite hypocrisy around lines and boundaries for abuse.

@BeverleyMacker
I just read it would have cost 20 grand to exhume and no one was willing to pay. I'm sure those who visited when the stone was there will know where he is. Hoping people regularly dance on
Sorry - having trouble with the reply quotes! If memory serves, the burial was very well publicised with him reportedly buried at an angle ‘to see the sea’. So I guess lots of people locally will know which spot he’s in, and understandably, object to his presence.

@CurlewKate

*@MrsElijahMikaelson1 "Amazing acting in this. Brilliant with the juxtaposition of his real life victims."

Yeah. Must have been simply wonderful for all the other real life
victims too. Imagine the thrill seeing their abuser up there on screen acted out by a real life STAR. Prosthetic chin and all.*

Obviously it is easy for you to be bitchy to me from behind your screen but if you had quoted the rest of my post it would have had more meaning and would quite clearly show that I didn’t mean what you’re implying.

In case you don’t quite understand, FYI My meaning was that the positioning of his real life victims telling their stories added impact to the series and showed the real life harrowing effect that Savill’s actions had.; and the impact it had on their lives. And your quite frankly pathetic comment about imagining the thrill of seeing their abuser played by a star is disgusting.

do better

Coogan is very good as Savile but better as the older version. No getting around it, it's easy to age up than age down. Coogan has too much of a midriff to be the younger guy, even if Savile always seemed a ghoulish middle-aged type anyway. Coogan also doesn't always capture Savile's charm and bounce, which many say he never had but... on YouTube clips I see it, he had an energy, a positivity that was worth a lot in the grim era of the three-day week. He had a bit of the actor Wilfrid Hyde Whyte, or the puppet Basil Brush, a sort of sly twinkle, a bit of mischief.
Coogan tends to be cast more as socially awkward, foot in mouth types, from Partridge onwards.

It will be trolling to some to point out his similarities to another peroxide comedian Boris Johnson but I will anyway - neither had any obvious talent, it was all bluster and nonsense and hi-energy all the way.

It depends what rabbit hole you want to descend but it does seem Savile had links to a few care homes - in Surrey, I think, was it one in Nork? Lawyers who investigate such alleged crimes - there's one long gone kids care home in Firtree Road in Banstead lawyers have been asking for evidence and testimony for years now, how long will it take then to actually bring charges? - tend to sit on it for years, gathering evidence, as if for the State's benefit.
Savile was said to have visited Northern Ireland a fair bit - that was a happy hunting ground for paedos in the late 60s and indeed Lord Mountbatten is alleged to have worked his way through one Northern Ireland care home, as in sexually abusing the young lads there, so there you have the link.

If you know the dirty secrets, the State will cover for you - so long as you have them in your back pocket and don't wave them around or look like you may whistleblow, then it's a very different outcome.
And one way of being trusted with the State's dirty secrets is to have a few of your own - you're hardly going to risk whistleblowing then, are you?
There's a YouTube clip on a 1970s edition of Parkinson with Savile and MASH star Alan Alda as a fellow guest listening in on what seems to be Savile's usual brand of verbal nonsense anecdote but the comments below point out what a very odd story it is - Savile introducing a young girl to Prince Philip at a bash at Buckingham Palace. It really did seem like a partially made-up story as a way of flagging up to the powers that be - 'Remember, I know your secrets and I'm keeping them for now. Make sure you look after me.' If so, that they certainly did.

Steve Coogan looked too nice in this even with the wigs and clothes.
What I mean by that is Saville was really really ugly with awful skin/ teeth.
Coogan always weirdly looks youthful. Decent bone structure maybe.

It would have been even creepier sicker with someone that looked as awful as Saville. He looked like a corpse when he was 55 let alone 75.

it jarred a bit the way they interspersed the drama with clips of actual Jimmy Saville on Through the Keyhole or TOTP. Then cutting back to Steve Coogan playing JS, which just made me think Coogan hadn’t captured his utter oddness and creepiness at all really.

I'm pretty certain that it came out about Jimmy Savile that he would drive to a girls school in that stupid Rolls-Royce, and he would speak to the headmistress, and he would take a girl, any girl from the sound of it, out for a drive in his car. Those girls were 16 or younger.

We could say this about all kinds of things eg WW2 atrocities . If a programme then makes us aware of what happened then it should open our eyes to what is around us and be more vigilant. You have many people who will only have vaguely heard of JS.

Other Buggers Efforts!

As a drama, this didn’t work for me because of the revisionism. I just don’t buy that pretty much everyone he came across knew what he was up to, and were talking about it with each other. I would have much preferred for there to have been a focus on his victims, like in The Long Shadow. Maybe it could have been a six-parter.

I love Siobhan Finneran, but even she couldn’t convince as a thirty- something in the 1960s, same as the actor who played her husband. But Steve Coogan was extraordinary as Saville, a performance that could easily have come across as caricatured with an actor less talented.

@bronkie I think there are very few people who have not heard of Jimmy Saville. But if there is a need to keep the memory alive, then there is an excellent book and documentary. No need for a fictional account. That is just prurience.

It's hardly a "fictional account" when some of the survivors were on screen to tell their true stories and others were consulted in the making of this programme.

So, either you've watched the programme, thereby contributing to the "prurience", or you haven't watched it but want to have a dig at others who have and are critically evaluating it.
Which is it?

Have seen the first 3 episodes. Found it had watching the Jim’ll scenes as I loved that prog - we all did - little did we know…. I don’t know anyone who picked up on his creepiness at the time either - we were young kids of 8/9 - didn’t even know what being a paedo was really.
As for the reason for the programme

• chance for victims to speak out
• shows how complete fuckers hide in plain sight - have come across some myself

Since I posted my post I read and noticed that you have come on here over and over and over again to say the same thing. We get it.

Did any of the victims end up pregnant?
Secret abortions etc. Horrible.

@CurlewKate I have posted this on the other non-spoilers thread, but I think it's an argument as to why this needed to be made:

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.

@CurlewKate I appreciated Rachel Cooke's POV. Here's an unpaywalled version of the article if anyone is interested.

I remember a while ago, a woman on This Morning saying she is his daughter. Her mother get pregnant after meeting him in a club. Always wondered what happened to her as this way before he died.
They tried to pay her off but she didnt want the money she just wanted to know who her father was. As her mum had died.

My nan at the time said he was creepy and dont know why people liked him so much.

www.express.co.uk/news/uk/351409/Jimmy-Savile-s-a-monster-I-don-t-want-to-be-his-daughter
41 year old, named, in 2012 giving up her quest to know if she's his daughter

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jimmy-saviles-secret-daughter-mum-5207352.amp
29 year old, not named, trying to find out if she is his daughter

Can't find anything later yet

I never liked JS as a child but even though I felt that way he was still part of my childhood and I feel so sad thinking that many of his victims were the age that I was then. I have my own traumas to recount and similarly the abuser was very popular in the community but I cannot imagine what it would be like if your abuser was a huge celebrity. It would be like living a double life - the image of the man onscreen clashing with your horrible reality. Poor poor kids.