Reviewing the acting in The Reckoning is easy - Steve Coogan is excellent. But reviewing the presentation of the subject matter is not so straightforward.
As someone born in the 60's, I grew up in what might be called, "The Savile Era" and have always been slightly irritated by the notion that Savile was somehow hiding in plain sight and that what happened was another manifestation of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' when, in actual fact, pretty much everyone that I grew up with considered him a weirdo many, many years before anything appeared in the newspapers. There were, in fact, kids up and down the land who were pointing and making fun of him on a daily basis right from the get-go. If anyone was starstruck by Savile, and is mainly to blame, it is the adults and not the children.
I have not read the book by Dan Davies, but assume that it must cover a lot more than was shown in this docudrama. To be honest, I was expecting more disclosures in this series than I already knew, but there didn't seem to be anything else to add.
There is no mention at all on his relationship with his father, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that Savile was an only child as his six older siblings are suspicious by their absence and barely get a mention - did they really all abandon their mother?
The BBC's/ITV's completely unnecessary decision to change the real suicide of (Samantha) Claire McAlpine into the story of an entirely fictional British Asian girl called Sara is not only disrespectful, but utterly unforgiveable. As a viewer, you know that the bar has been set pretty low when the writers have to resort to inventing conversations that took place in a church confessional.
Savile himself reveals nothing, despite the claims made in the final episode that he was going to - and then he died (see review by DC1977 for the veracity of this claim).
Savile comes across not as some mastermind groomer but as a chancer: a pathetic, hapless groper with a sense of misguided entitlement. There were lots like him around in the 70's & 80's and, I'm sure, there still are today.
A strange, creepy, evil man who exploited his celebrity status on vulnerable young people, but though he may have pulled the wool over the eyes of The Establishment, there were plenty of us (like Beryl Hullighan) who made up our minds about him very early on.
We thought he was a weirdo, and we were right.
