It takes a very brave actor to play a man as irredeemable as the late Jimmy Savile, but Steve Coogan is up to the task.
Steve Coogan has never been afraid to be unlikeable. His greatest comic creation, the radio and sometime-TV presenter Alan Partridge, is a classic study in pomposity and self-delusion, while his self-parody infilms and TV series, in which he stars and spars with Rob Brydon, is unsparing in its dissection of the inflated yet fragile male ego.But nothing he has done before comes close to the role of Jimmy Savile in terms of loathsomeness, even as there are echoes in it of those two other turns.
This four-part drama is from the BBC, and stands as a belated act of contrition and self-flagellation. It includes testimony from four of Savile’s real-life victims, and extensive clips from the archive of the real Savile on– a show on which for 19 years he used the promise of making kids’ dreams come true as cover for inflicting nightmares that will never end – alongside Coogan’s through-the-decades portrayal. It’s as fascinating to watch as it is horrific.
It’s as if Savile’s life was one long act of brinkmanship, with a mounting pile of victims providing the ever-taller precipice on which he dared himself to balance. There’s no plea for sympathy here, at least not for the devil. Savile is beyond the pale, beyond forgiveness, ultimately beyond any sort of humanity with which we might wish to identify. He is a creep, an abuser, a heartless hustler for whom good works were merely a passage to bad deeds..