I haven’t yet viewed the BBC’s incoming four-part drama about Jimmy Savile. I will therefore, unlike significant lumps of the British media, not be commenting directly on the content. It is three years since the corporation announced it was to embark on the project we now know as The Reckoning. Steve Coogan stars as Savile, the notorious TV personality who was, decades later than should have been the case, revealed as one of the UK’s most prolific sex offenders. The revelations after Savile’s death caused unprecedented soul-searching within the UK’s main public-service broadcaster. Even with that in mind, the amount of anticipatory hot air blasted in the direction of The Reckoning is extraordinary. Few series so unseen have been so thoroughly lambasted.
Nearly a year after it was mooted, two years before its eventual broadcast date, Richard Morrison, writing in the Times of London, was already “queasy” about “giving any publicity to The Reckoning”. In a mostly sober piece, Morrison admitted that “we must learn from the past” before deciding that “what film and TV dramatisations do, however, is usually very different from that kind of sombre, detailed analysis”. There is something in that. But there are notable exceptions. Think of Appropriate Adult, ITV’s eminently sensitive film on the aftermath of the Fred West murders. Neil McKay, the writer of that drama, is also behind The Reckoning. So we’ll see.
A little over a year ago, writing in the UK Independent, Pragya Agarwal, like Morrison, conjured up the spectre of “entertainment”. This word is brandished almost as often as “profit” in such arguments. “Their worst nightmares are being brought to life on screen,” she wrote (not unreasonably) of the survivors. “To be enjoyed by millions – and creating entertainment from the loss of their childhoods, dignity and self-respect.”
This is a tricky one. One can argue that all art – or perhaps we now mean all “content” – is aiming at something adjacent to entertainment, something in the same broad category as situation comedies and Punch and Judy shows. But the accusation is less often directed at theatrically released films about human catastrophe. Many have criticised Schindler’s List over the years, but few have suggested the victims were being exploited for entertainment. At this year’s Cannes film festival, there were dissenters from the near-universal celebration of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a tale of Auschwitz, but few were brandishing the E-word.
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Put simply, nobody is suggesting these films are fun. Television can also manage that seriousness of purpose. Besides Appropriate Adult, think of Jimmy McGovern’s work on Bloody Sunday and the Hillsborough disaster. Come to mention it, think of the recent, fine documentary series on the Savile outrages. Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, despite its blaring title, proved an admirably restrained investigation of a still-unimaginable catalogue of wretchedness.
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Those early newspaper pieces did not overheat. The real diatribes broke out at the release of a trailer last week. The promo shows Savile selling himself to the BBC. We hear an unidentified voice saying, “As old as I am now, I would have danced on his grave.” We now know the series will incorporate interviews with four survivors of Savile’s abuse. Talk TV, the British fulmination horn, was not having it.
Rumours of Savile’s abuse had been circulating in the BBC for 40 years. Even after his death, a Newsnight report on his crimes was shelved
“It’s absolutely vulgar,” Alex Armstrong declared on that channel. “It’s disgusting what they’re doing. They’re glorifying these wretched people.”
Are they? I suppose they might be. But there is no such suggestion in the clip.
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“I think it’s a full vindication of the BBC,” André Walker followed up. “I think it’s a full exoneration of the BBC.”
Is it? Anything is possible. But I can’t see it here.
There was more where that came from. The three-year furore says something about the way human beings still struggle to grasp the basic notion that depiction does not equal endorsement. It says something about the unstoppable urge to signpost one’s own virtue. It says a great deal about how so much other media now, more than ever before, hates the BBC. And it reveals a few legitimate concerns.
To be fair, what distinguishes The Reckoning from these other treatments of true-life tragedies is the involvement of a key player in the story. Rumours of Savile’s abuse had been circulating in the BBC for 40 years. Even after his death, a Newsnight report on his crimes was shelved. This will certainly require some delicate manoeuvring. Nothing is, however, to be gained from taking offence at material that has yet to make it on to your screen. We also got this when it was announced that Kenneth Branagh was playing Boris Johnson in This England. Okay, that wasn’t very good. But that’s not the point.
It is best to travel hopefully.
The Reckoning begins on BBC One on Monday, October 9th
