The Reckoning - BBC Drama on Savile

[SuperStu]

I've watched the first three now, will probably try to finish it this evening.

Honestly I don't think it's been great. For me Steve Coogan keeps slipping in to Alan Partridge. The scene where hes at the BBC meeting and they're pitching the Jim'll Fix It premise and he says something like "A parapalegic climbing Ben Nevis in a wheelchair" to me sounded exactly like it would be a line in AP.

I also feel like the shows giving too many other people too much benefit of the doubt. E.g. the scene with Thatcher talking to her cabinet secretary and saying "but what are these rumours?"... As if she wouldn't have known.

 

[Redwurzel]

It's really easy to be wise after the event, as the nurse said in the first episode 'that's just Jimmy' and that's certainly probably always my view when he was alive. He always seemed a bit odd, but unless you are a victim you don't know what that means. We need to make it easier for victims to come forward, it's still not straight forward.

Saville was certainly deemed odd in the 1970s, but the entertainment business seemed to like odd people.

I am not saying its the same but the Carry on films seemed to be full of odd characters.

Thatcher loved working class Tories, because she was socially above them and politcially they made the difference, opposed to more landed/old school Tories like Willie Whitelaw. Saville's shows got big audiences of working class/lower middle class viewers who she wanted to be popular with. (Sun/Daily Mail readers).

I always thought the music/entertainment business too was a dangerous place for young teenagers. Even Discos in the 1970s. I remember girls at my school in Whitby boasting about going to Nighclubs in Scarborough and they were aged 13 and being propositioned by adult males, they would call them pervs, then laugh and continue to go. In 1983, Mandy Smith was the 13 year old girlfriend of a Rolling Stone and this was not healthy, but seemed to be accepted because she looked older and supposedly not having sex with him, it all created a sleazy environment that would not happend today or less likely.

What doesn't come across fully in the drama is that Saville would be constantly doing very well publicised charity work, hundreds of episodes of Jim Will Fix It - he was part of the furniture for people of my generation watching TV in the 1970s and 80s like Noel Edmonds or Ant and Dec today, so as a young person/teenager then, you didn't see them as weird or odd as I do now. I suppose I am more disappointed in people in their 40s and 50s who looked at him through more mature eyes and surely could see some manipulation going on. He certainly reigned without any doubts from the late 1960s to 1993.