Jimmy Savile: is The Reckoning a dramatisation too far?

It was a brave move to create a BBC drama out of the story of a vile, predatory paedophile, said Carol Midgley in The Times. 

But the makers of The Reckoning – a new four-part drama about Jimmy Savile – did a good job. It's a "respectful, impressive piece of work", and Steve Coogan is brilliant in the main role. 

The drama sets out to examine how such a prolific abuser got away with it for so long, said Julia Raeside in The iPaper, and it goes "some way to achieving that" by capturing the way that Savile succeeded in manipulating people. The dramatic sequences are interspersed with testimony from Savile's victims, which lends the whole thing added power. It's difficult viewing, but "if it brings us any closer to stopping something like this from happening again, I'd argue the discomfort was worthwhile".

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'Did we really need it?'

As a drama, The Reckoning works well enough, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, but did we really need it? Netflix only recently produced a very thorough, three-hour documentary about Savile. To justify going over this story again, you'd need to add something of value. This drama just recounts what we already know, while speculating that Savile's predilection stemmed from the fact that, as an unwanted seventh child, he hadn't been loved enough by his mother.

Worse still is the way the drama subtly passes the buck, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. A whole episode is devoted to showing how close Savile was to Margaret Thatcher. Much is also made of his Catholicism. By contrast, the BBC – one of the only places where people actually knew about Savile's abuses – escapes lightly.

'True crime fodder'

The broadcaster's shameful decision to shelve Newsnight's exposé of Savile shortly after his death is only mentioned in a postscript. If the BBC commissioned this drama in order to offer a full accounting of its failures, it has come up short, said Robin Aitken in The Daily Telegraph.

But you can't help feeling that, for all the high-minded rhetoric about honouring the victims, this is a lurid story told mainly for ratings. "We don't need Savile served up as true crime fodder – least of all by the organisation that nurtured him, groomed him for stardom and inflicted him on the entire country."