Steve Coogan, who plays the serial sex abuser Jimmy Savile in a highly controversial BBC drama, has challenged accusations made this weekend that the four-part series is a useful fig leaf to cover the public broadcaster’s damaged reputation. Talking to the Observer on the eve of the broadcasts, he spoke candidly about the dangers of taking on the disturbing role of the paedophile entertainer and suggested that predators and bullies often adopt a charismatic persona to mask their abuses.
“Savile could control every room intuitively. With any predator, almost across the board – and including people in entertainment – there’s an ability to hide behind a professional disposition,” said Coogan. “The court jester thing that Savile put on for his career, and for his subterfuge, was a suit of armour for him. And in showbusiness there’s a lack of structure or protocols, compared with other professions, so it is a fertile environment for people to act outside the norm.”
The makers of the drama, The Reckoning, producer Jeff Pope and writer Neil McKay, have also been criticised in some reviews for making salacious entertainment from a series of exploitative crimes and adding to Savile’s notoriety. The drama series, which ends with Savile’s death, also stops short of dramatising the BBC decision to axe a Newsnight investigation into his crimes, although it does allow some real-life victims, who appear on screen, to express their anger at the broadcasting of a tribute show.
“There is no approach that we could have taken with this drama that would stop people using it as a stick to beat the BBC if they want to,” said Coogan. “If they had avoided making a drama, they would have been attacked for that. I’m no agent for the BBC and it often annoys me, but sometimes it seems like a beacon in a sea of darkness.”
Viewers will be able to judge for themselves, but Coogan argues that Pope and McKay’s project “encompasses all the BBC’s foundational, Reithian values in the best way”, without becoming “sanctimonious or pious”. He and his producer debated early on, the actor says, whether the BBC might ask them all to step carefully around the corporation’s role in building up Savile as a popular national figure, enabling his abuse. “Jeff said he felt instead that the BBC wanted to do a mea culpa as an institution and that seemed a good thing, although that is not why we did it.”
Pope, also reacting this weekend, said he still believes that a fictionalised drama was the right way to communicate Savile’s bullying personality because, unlike a documentary, it let them show how the predator is known to have behaved off-camera. A similar forensic approach won Pope and McKay plaudits with Four Lives, the TV drama about the serial killer Stephen Port. “Also, I am not a BBC man and Neil and I came to them with this idea, rather than the other way round,” he said.
One of the lesser villains of the story is the BBC’s Bill Cotton, the late former controller of BBC One who allowed Savile to take the presenter’s job on the long-running children’s show Jim’ll Fix It, overriding the misgivings of a few colleagues. “I think Bill was hoodwinked by Savile, like thousands of others,” said Pope. “We contacted Cotton’s relatives about the drama and did not hear back. But we have not gone beyond anything established by Dame Janet Smith’s independent review of the BBC’s handling of Savile.”
McKay’s script focuses on the perpetrator, rather than dwelling on the environments that gave him cover. Coogan and Pope suspect that if they had also shown the violent misogyny of some of “the Tetley bitter men” of 1960s and 70s Manchester, where Savile began his career playing pop music, or the sexist attitudes of the entertainment industry in the 1970s and 80s, it might have looked like an excuse for his crimes. “We could have shown more of the culpability of wider society, it is true,” said Coogan, “but if you pull the story in one direction, you lose in another. Certainly it was not just a question of one or two rotten apples in the barrel, but we didn’t want to appear to show any mitigation for what Savile actually did.”
Coogan revealed he shaved his head each day for the role in order to save time in the make-up chair each morning. “It was one hour less of having to stare at Jimmy in the mirror,” he said, adding that he now saw the DJ as “a con man” who should have been recognised as “a nasty piece of work” even without the discovery of his hidden sexual abuse of young women and children. “I tried to almost dissociate from what I was doing each day, literally discarding it all with Savile’s costume later, but sometimes the physicality can stay with you. My daughter did say that I was still talking a bit like Jimmy Savile one evening over dinner, so I said sorry. On the last day of filming I remember I was so glad to think I would never have to look like that again. There was a sense of relief. What stopped me going into a really dark place was working with a crew and colleagues and being there to do a professional job.”One distressing scene set in a hospital morgue did give the actor pause, he has admitted, and so he requested that it be altered. However, viewers will still witness a partial dramatisation of one of Savile’s most deviant acts.
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Pope said the search for the correct tone for the drama meant avoiding too many of Savile’s catchphrases and mannerisms. “And this was not just a drama about a series of loosely connected crimes either,” he added. The drama shows the DJ with Margaret Thatcher, members of the royal family and the Pope. “The Reckoning is about a man who wanted to take over the world. Savile pushed open doors he thought would never open.”
