Skip to main content

The Reckoning review – Steve Coogan is chillingly brilliant as Jimmy Savile

Coogan captures the charm and creepy depravity of the notorious abuser. But this is a horrific tale most of us already know – and the BBC’s depressing drama adds little of value

If you are among the vanishingly few people left in the country who do not know that Jimmy Savile was an absolutely evil man, then I recommend watching The Reckoning, a dramatisation of his story written by Neil McKay and starring Steve Coogan as the necro-paedophile, OBE.

If you do know who he is – well, I wonder. Stripped of context, The Reckoning is a rigorously well-made and polished thing. It takes us from 1962, as Savile’s career as a DJ on the northern club circuit began to gain traction, through his years as an increasingly beloved and powerful figure on radio and then television, and on until his much-mourned death in 2011 at the age of 84, untouched and then untouchable by any revelations about his awful secrets. For some reason, it is interspersed with a lot of archive footage of the real Savile that interrupts the viewer’s engagement. Stopping your tale to remind people that truth and the man at the heart of it were even stranger than fiction is an odd decision.

The Reckoning aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/P0B7z6D

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

England booed off after failing against Iceland once more in Euros warm-up

It was a long way from being the triumphant Euro 2024 send-off for Gareth Southgate and his England players at a sold-out and increasingly fretful Wembley. Never mind the result because it was not the main thing, however much it stirred memories of you-know-when against Iceland. It was the performance that raised the difficult questions, the worst one for quite some time and at exactly the wrong time. The home fans, thousands of whom made for the exits before the end, were forced to watch the second half – from about minute 55 onwards – through the gaps between their fingers. And it had not been great before that. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/4ndfQL0
Post a Comment
Read more

Bodies of Men: the love story taking on toxic masculinity in a time of war

Nigel Featherstone’s new novel tackles traditional conservatism and patriarchy through an unconventional romance How can you be a man and be anti-war? This is the question that Sydney-born novelist Nigel Featherstone, who is a pacifist, considered while he took up a three-month writing residency in a military library. He set out to discover what happens to very different expressions of masculinity placed under military pressure. “Australia does have a very defined, toxic brand of masculinity,” says the bespectacled Featherstone, seated by the window at his local pub facing the railway station at Goulburn, north of Canberra, while men on stools at the nearby bar sink beers and televisions on the walls screen horse racing results. Continue reading... from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2N8piOc
Post a Comment
Read more

Coronavirus live news: California sees record daily cases as global infections top 15m

California Covid-19 cases pass New York’s after record day ; WHO emergencies chief says vaccinations unlikely before 2021; global cases pass 15m. Follow the latest updates US daily coronavirus deaths surpass 1,000 for first time since June California surpasses New York as state with most coronavirus cases after record day Nearly a quarter of people in Delhi have had coronavirus, study finds See all our coronavirus coverage 12.54am BST South Africa on Wednesday announced a record 24-hour increase of 572 coronavirus deaths, bringing its total number of fatalities to 5,940, AFP reports. The country is the worst-affected in Africa and among the top five in the world in terms of confirmed cases, with 394,948 infections reported to date. 12.33am BST Dr Deborah Birx, the chief medical officer on the White House’s coronavirus task force, has called the surge in infections across the United States, “a very different epidemic than we had in March and April”. Speaking on Fox news, Bir...
Post a Comment
Read more