Review: The Reckoning

Jimmy Savile and the Postwar Consensus

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Jimmy Savile has become an object of obsession since his death. Reckoning follows a 5 part Netflix series about the man and several years of uninterrupted tabloid commentary. The Savile scandal had a huge effect on culture and broke when I was starting secondary school. At the same time, the Times revealed the scope of industrialised sexual abuse of girls in Rotherham and Simon Danczuk M.P began his ill-starred investigation into Westminster child abuse. A string of other grizzled, tanned oldies: Max Clifford, Rolf Harris and Gary Glitter were simultaneously exposed and faced trial while the first rumblings of perdition were detected in the Holy See. It was a very fun time to be a 13 year old boy, the sorts of things our parents would've preferred to keep hidden from us were almost daily put into the national limelight and could not be explained away. I can remember Savile profile pictures on BMS and Facebook, he was a butt of jokes and edgy humour on the school bus for years after his unmasking and became a synecdoche for nonce. Perhaps this is why I find it hard to be shocked by subsequent revelations of elite misdeeds, like Boris Johnson eating cake; although the experience was hardly definitive and I do not know how much other people in my age cohort agree. 

The popular narrative of Savile is that he wormed his way into 'The Establishment' and exploited the hedonistic culture of rock n'roll to perpetrate his crimes. The Left tends to emphasise the first part, the Right the second. There is much truth to the first part and this essay shall address Savile's connections to Tory England, yet it is also partly evasive. The more interesting thing about Savile is that the values he used to cloak his abuse were the values we still hold today. The institutions he worked in: the NHS, the BBC and mental health are those championed by the egalitarian morality of modern Britain. Saville was different from the sadistic public schools game teacher or paederastic M.P in that his abuse was directly enabled by the welfare state. This is why he continues to be an object of fascination in a way that Cyril Smith is not, we all feel that there is something missing from the endlessly reiterated explanation. 

The key to understanding the second half of the 20th century was the fact the world's most destructive conflict had just been fought and almost every educated person knew a mistake had been made. Weapons had been built capable of killing millions in seconds, half of Europe was signed over to a giant prison camp. In other words, everything which had given Western civilisation confidence in itself: the primacy of the individual, the possibility of moral action according to conscience, the improvement of human nature, the freedom of the will and heroism on the battlefield seemed to be over. It was regarded by those steeped in the Western canon, irrespective of ideology, as an apocalyptic moment. Only a God could save us. 

Nowhere was this transformation more pertinently felt than Britain, which had gone from being the richest nation in Europe irrespective of being an ailing global superpower, to a barracks-room, command economy effectively vassalized to the United States. As the premier bourgeois culture, England's real heritage was inextricably linked to the past which had to be thrown away. Orwell set out the party line in The Lion and the Unicorn; there was to be nothing that the pukka sahibs, port-stained colonels and hanging judges, who had presided merrily over an unparalleled period of human progress from Hogarth to Hitler, could further contribute to human history. Instead, a new national mythos was forged. Britain was no longer the nation of Clive and Cromwell, chary for the sake of its ancient liberties and litigious to the point of absurdity; instead, England had an primal, agrarian, vaguely Celtic, vaguely Catholic past and a present defined through state bureaucracies like the NHS. Britain was not special for being more liberal than the continent but for being more authoritarian and collectivist than the USA. The Monarchy, previously seen as a sensitive topic liable to cause Old Loyalties to flare up, now became the assumed standard of Britishness as spurious link between two, otherwise separate, points in time. England, one of the great world-civilisations, was to ape the fashions of 19th century central Europe. It is a process which goes on to this day. 

It is important to understand this context to properly appreciate the attraction of Rock n'Roll and the Swinging Sixties which, for our generation, are distant customs which require the study of an alien mindset. For while the sixties shaped Baby Boomers, it was not produced by them, it was produced by men who had caught a glimpse of this apocalypse: The Colonel Parkers, the Charles Mansons and the Jimmy Saviles. In this moment of total gloom, a light began to shine in the living room. One of the best scenes in Reckoning is when Jimmy moves his mother into a new apartment in Scarborough, he comes into the room to find his mother watching T.V and tries in vain to get her attention away from the screen. The writers no doubt intended this to show the indifference of Savile's mother to her youngest son but I prefer to think of it as a subtle gesture to the real power behind the 20th century. Television was seductive, mesmerising and biologically sedating in a way computers are not. Their foremost bard, Marshall MacLuhan explained that Computers, like books, require some active input from the user; while they can be addictive, they do stimulate the mind but Television reduces the audience to a state of total passivity. 

Reckoning does a good job of conveying how new and genuinely enthralling the culture of pop was when it first appeared on the scene. Here was something outside the canon of Homer and Shakespeare killed at Stalingrad nonetheless, apparently, uncontaminated by the Hammer and Sickle. When Savile appears before the BBC bosses he comes as the innovator of new rules, the messenger of a world which they think they do not understand; and so cannot judge. Jimmy Savile wants to live in a caravan. Fine. This is Punk. This is how they do things now. Who is going to tell you otherwise? Anthony Powell? Pffffffttttt. How was Jimmy Savile to be judged? Certainly not by the standards of mess-hall chivalry, protecting the virtue of young maidens, that would be Fascist. Nor could Savile be judged by the watery moralities of the New Jerusalem; people were bored of them, and rightly, they wanted something fun. Pop music was fun. The pill was fun. We should not condemn those who enjoyed them when the alternative was Black Panthers and Clement Attlee. Throughout Savile's life, he never made an effort to make it big in America, like so many celebrities of his generation; he was, a supporter of Levelling Up before its time, his network spanned Northern towns and suburban hospitals rather than private vice-islands. He knew that his power was intimately tied to the specific institutions of postwar Britain; in any foreign country he'd be adrift. 

I enjoyed the show much more than I expected; Coogan captures Savile's mannerisms while not looking like him; this is not always detrimental, Coogan has a uniquely sanctimonious scowl he deploys well at Saville's most disgusting moments. Reckoning avoids the hamfisted 'I understood that historical reference!' of The Crown and recreates the feel of postwar Britain through subtle scenes woven into the main narrative. It captures emotions unusual for British television, like the nervous, chivvying desire for approval shown by Posh people to charismatic working class people: the BBC exec who laughs a little too loudly at all of Saville's jokes, the desire to be "one of the good ones", "you, you Hugh you're not like the other lot you GET what life is about". Chuck Guelph frequently described Savile as 'someone who understood how the world works'. This explains, to a large part, the mundane aspect of Savile's appeal. He understood that privileged people feel guilty over never having struggled and doubt their own individuality as a result, he reassured them that this wacky, zany character from Leeds didn't hold it against them: indeed, they were in on the ruse. The people who shared Savile's own background were those most sceptical of him. 

The three main problems for me were the focus on Catholicism, the criticism of historical figures as opposed to culpable contemporaries of our own age and the narrative of the final episode. I personally enjoyed the focus on Savile's religion; it was never explored in the 2012 commentary about the man, I had no idea he hosted religious programmes for the BBC and wrote commentaries on Bible verses for tabloid papers. On the other hand, you cannot help suspect the superfluity of references to The Pope and redundant scenes of Savile in church are included mainly to buttress the impression of the audience (the Netflix serial killer doc crowd) that Roman Catholicism is somehow intrinsically linked to child abuse. At the very least, a made up Catholic character should've chastised him to escape the accusation of fomenting a new Black Legend. 

Margaret Thatcher has been dead ten years and is largely a figure of contempt, it is among the most widespread beliefs that Thatcher was bad; there are far more shocking things about Thatcher and paedophilia anyway, like her involvement in the MI5 dossier's disappearance and patronage of Harvey Procter, which would do better as a series in themselves: she is one of the few people for whom it could be said focus on Savile is a sanitising distraction. King Charles III, by contrast, is very much alive and making a sustained effort to persuade people he is a harmless, funny, likeable figure; the British public are still somewhat lukewarm towards him, a calculated reminder of his murky past would be timely and influential. It is a cop-out, in this case, to go after her when a far more juicy target is in view. The programme is already good but could've ascended to the stature of a cultural moment if it dared to put King Chuck on screen, as a Tim nice but Dim character being entirely taken in by Savile and highlighted the full breadth of his complicity. It could potentially rile up one of the lesser tabloids.

In the final episode, there are moments which imply Savile somehow couldn't get away with his crimes anymore because society had changed. The doctor who, as a young man in previous scenes, applauds Jimmy's antics is suddenly frothing with asseveration. The BBC execs who we know were perfectly happy to commemorate Savile are shown standing up to him. An unearned Whig history is introduced and it is is not true; high profile paedophile scandals have continued to happen in 21st century, Elf n'Safety Britain.  This goes hand and hand with the final episode's attempt at a moment of nemesis for Savile, where he is portrayed as lonely, god-fearing and haunted by guilt in his later years of irrelevance. It is much the same story with the tone newspapers use to talk about Prince Andrew continuing to live a charmed life courtesy of the taxpayer; Andrew 'humiliated', Andrew will have to deal with the noisy builders, Andrew evicted from his third mansion: all so many words to say he has gotten away with it. To me, Savile's peaceful later years, punctured by occasional comeback tours at special ceremonies (would he have had a role in the Olympics?) is further girst to the mill of condemnation and not a sign of his unhappiness. It is not true that on his deathbed he was barely recognised, I remember adults referencing him when I was at school and he was still able to cadge free meals from local takeaways.

The string of high profile sex scandals over the past decade have produced a number of different responses; there is definitely a feeling that something must be done. Alas, since it is still barely possible to discuss these scandals in an uncensored public context many of the responses bear the hallmarks of all suppressed trauma; incredible rage and fear is directed away from the powerful towards more acceptable targets. The tone for this was set by the BBC's inquiry into its responsibility for Savile in 2013 where a social historian concluded the problem was with the "culture" of the 1970s where sexual liberation was taken as a carte blanche for depravity; this approach appears convenient, it means no specific individuals with names and pay-checks have to resign, yet it has hidden consequences for the rest of us in how it changes cultural norms. A good example of this is the rising moral panic about age-gaps in consensual relationships, increasingly, the normal male preference for younger women is interpreted as inherently abusive; the eminently normal Leonardo diCaprio is occasionally spoken of as a colleague of Joseph Fritzl for dating 25 year old, adult women. It is worth remembering that in the 1960s and 70s, many thousands of underage women had consensual relationships with Jim Morrison, John Lennon and Mick Jagger without regret. Savile would not have been stopped by cataloguing his "red flags".

If the culture, forbidden from talking about the real problem for so long, increasingly moves in this direction of finding scapegoats it might be the case that in the future all relationships between young people become taboo. A year after Prince Andrew was allowed to walk free, a number of English public schools saw sex scandals where teenage boys were accused of sexually harassing their classmates. A number of the parents protested the allegations were unfounded, or that the behaviour was normal for people their age. It is not our place to pass judgement on the facts of the case; what's clear is that the people involved did not perceive themselves as breaking social norms in the way Savile and other abusers obviously did. So long as the powerful men at the top of society are allowed, seemingly, to get away with one standard of behaviour, trying to impose new standards from below will always seem bitterly hypocritical. Society is clearly less comfortable talking about homosexual child abuse than the heterosexual kind; in Reckoning, the one scene involving a boy is depicted in terms of oblique suggestiveness, a shut door, camera becomes fuzzy, a shadow falls. The scenes with girls are consciously graphic by contrast. This mirrors how we remember gay paedophiles versus straight ones; George Michael, Boy George, Stephen Fry and Michael Barrymoore have received less ignominy for their faux pas than Harvey Weinstein and Rolf Harris. 

Among the powerful people who have, time and again, evaded responsibility for their involvement in successive abuse scandals are the British royal family. The Monarchy did not engage with Saville reluctantly, as one among many philanthropists who must be curried and courted to justify the existence of an entitled nobility. The excuse that it was simply part of the then Prince of Wales's job to fraternise with Saville, as the company of dictators and terrorists was forced upon the Queen, does not pass the sniff test. Saville became an intimate friend of Prince Charles and a number of other Royals, he worked as a marriage counsellor and consigliere. Saville was responsible for crafting pieces of Royal policy, it was to Saville whom Charles turned for advice on crafting a protocol for how the Royal Family was to appear as responding to major disasters. This advice was turned into a sort of memorandum, presented to the Queen and subsequently incorporated into standard Palace procedure. For a commoner to influence the Monarchy in such a way betokens an intimate relationship beyond the conventional bonhomie of officialdom. This relationship blossomed while allegations about Savile filtered into public view, the moment in 1988, where a hostile BBC audience publicly confronted Saville, used in Reckoning to mark his departure into irrelevance, coincided with Prince Charles's invitation to write this document. Charles would, as late as 1998, when Reckoning assures us Savile's abuse was all but an open secret, spend a weekend at the predator's Glen Coe House and thank him for his service with the words "Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country, Jimmy."

Could this all be excused as a mistake? Like Uncle Andy? Nothing to see here, guv? If a family has one paedophile among its members, that can maybe be passed off as a mistake. Could Prince Andrew have, potentially, taken up with Jeffrey E. on account of money trouble and kept it a secret from The Boss? Potentially. However, what happens if it is not just one member, it is two; what if Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles's mentor, was a serial abuser of young boys via his role in the Royal Navy, an abuser of such profligacy the FBI found out and used it to get Mountbatten's command taken away in India? Now you have two paedophiles in the family. Two paedophiles nobody seemingly noticed. And now throw Jimmy Savile, Kevin Spacey and Ghislaine Maxwell into the picture and how seemingly every high profile nonce for the past four decades has had a close and personal relationship with Prince Charles. That's not a coincidence even if you don't think it is conspiracy. 

"Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country, Jimmy." What a weird thing to say? Is it referring to his charity work? But everyone did know about that. That was why he got his OBE and Knight. "Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country, Bond." This is the language of High Military-Feudal-Aristocratic obligation. It is dambusters talk. It is weird. It gives me the creeps. Why is it in the Wikipedia page? This visit to Prince Charles came at a very interesting time in Savile's career. In 1998, Scotland Yard received its famous letter implicating Savile as a paedophile and sent to West Yorkshire police; it was duly marked as 'sensitive' and beyond the purview of other investigators. This was, by some accounts, the closest Savile ever came to being exposed in his own life. It certainly gives a different timbre to that stay at Glen Coe. Don't worry, you will never be prosecuted in your lifetime. Stand under my umbrella. "Nobody knows what you have done for this country, Jimmy": Эй, брат, не отставай!! - si signore, call me gawdfather. 

It was not a nebulous "culture" which enabled Jimmy Savile, or Jeffrey Epstein, or any of the names past or future which briefly swim to the surface of odium, before vanishing from the mass-mind without a trace. These individuals all filled a specific function; and this is my reckoning. Savile was not simply a prolific abuser, he was involved with procuring children to be abused by more powerful people in political networks and collecting blackmail on pop stars. Nothing else explains why he was feted with such enthusiasm by the highest in the land and allowed to live unmolested by the law into a ripe old age. At Broadmoor he would've been able to keep an eye on convicted molesters who could prove useful in the future; at Top of the Pops he could audit every potential superstar and put them in compromising situations if need be, as the patron of various charities he had access to a fixed supply of vulnerable people whom nobody would notice if they went missing and as a children's TV presenter he would not arouse too much suspicion if found at 11:30 pm driving a van full of little girls. 

Blackmail was the currency of the 20th century, pop stars as much as politicians required it. Do you not think Bowie could've become the next Hitler? Britain in 1978 is facing a catastrophic depression, millions are unemployed, all the main parties are hated; Britain in 1978 is not an ageing society, it has a demographic structure a bit like the Arab world today, the youth outnumber the old, the strong and able bodied outnumber the feeble and national service has been abolished and there is no work; and then you have David Bowie, a man with assets equal to the wealthiest private businessman, more popular than any politician or man of the cloth; what happens if David Bowie gets up on stage c. 1978 and says to his 15 million fans: form your own battalions, march on Parliament, hang that traitor Wilson and that traitor Heath, I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore! You need blackmail folks. You need to be fucking them kids. Even John Cleese could've pulled it off.

In one of the show's rare concessions to safeguarding political mores, Savile is made to loudly call Tony Blair a 'twat'; yet who was the more deserving heir to Jimmy Savile's moral revolution than His Tonyness? Blair had, after all, originally wanted to be a pop star, playing in the sort of band Savile would've chaperoned on Top of the Pops; it was the language of the pop star that Blair imported into politics: yeah, yeah, yeah - am I bothered? The endless, sneering malice towards anyone vaguely committed to ideas or high culture, the "people's princess", the worship of celebrities, the photo-ops in the NHS and spasms of crypto-Catholic religious moralism. Blairism was simply government by Top of the Pops. The essential doctrine behind both was that ethics could be totally reduced to consensus: if you saved some kiddies and smiled with the Queen, you were a good person and anyone who expected more was just jealous. 

Now let us compare two random passages of writing. Here is Savile in Love is an Uphill Battle:

"Don't call us we'll call you' is a famous showbiz brushoff. I claim to be the youngest recipient of this award at the age of two, and from the Big Agent himself: the Good Lord! Actually, at not quite two years old, I was dying. The Master, or one of his minders, hearing of this imminent addition to his heavenly host, sent in the nick of time a miracle cure." - p.1

"The Tour of Britain is a bike race of world class. I was riding for the North of England team in the very first one. At all the stage towns the riders were treated like pop stars, and the girls would flock around. But in those days, athletes were made of stern stuff and were usually in bed by 10 p.m." - p. 16

"My new world was a complete fairytale and it still is. Crazy, topsy-turvy, unreal, a social phenomenon of this century and I love it. Imagine what it is like to do almost what you want. Fly to Australia? Buy an island? Have a thousand suits? It is all yours so long as you don't let it kill you."

And now here is Blair in his biography: A Journey:

"I travel fairly easily, but the Hong Kong trip, done in a day and a half, was exhausting. It was also my first real experience of China’s leadership. It was an odd occasion. I was very attached to Hong Kong. I had visited reasonably often since my sister-in-law Katy was Hong Kong Chinese. She was very instructive on the subject of the return of the colony. Obviously she was Anglophile. Brought up a Catholic. Had lived a long time in the UK. But when I asked her if she felt sad at the return, she said immediately: No, I’m Chinese, it’s natural to be part of China. Occasionally the British fail to see the fact that although we are often regarded in many parts of the world by the indigenous people as having been good colonialists, those people no longer want us as colonialists. In the end, however benign we were, they prefer to run themselves and make their own mistakes." - p.128

"The prime minister is an MP with a constituency in which they stand for election like any other candidate. It is at one level very humbling, for at

that moment you are just the constituency candidate, you stand on a platform along with the other candidates as the returning officer reads out the result. Odd, but very democratic and rather good."

If the similarity is not immediately striking, try reading Savile's passages in Blair's voice and Blair's extract in Savile's Leeds accent. It is all there. The use of full stops where apostrophes should be, the grammatically observant use of idiomatic expressions ("stern stuff" for "sterner stuff"), the pop-sociopath's vocabulary of common, precise but more 'sophisticated' words ("recipient"), redundant detail ("they prefer to run themselves and make their own mistakes"). It uses folksy or slang expressions to erase ambiguity and avoid providing detail; it is credulous towards the existence of metaphysical concepts or value judgements ("Do you have a problem with Making people Happy?") and it blends dialogue with descriptive speech.   

The conditions which enabled someone like Jimmy Savile have not changed at all since the 1960s, what has changed is the ability of the culture to generate Jimmy Saviles: there is no monoculture imposing the same programmes, bands and celebrities on everyone whether they like it or not. The final failing of Reckoning, then, is its failure to truly close the book on Savile and thus give us a genuine message of positivity. There is too much doom and gloom and not enough messages of hope. We may labour at behest of Babylon but know that in the mountains Young Cyrus readies his Aryan legions to descend the narrow passes and teach us how to write down the Pentateuch and worship the Sacred Flame. In this case, the Good News comes in the form of the Internet, the dark forces which the BBC, in shows like Black Mirror and its approach to 'disinformation', has come to portray as a purely negative force; disrupting Britain's "broadcast ecology" and undermining social trust. Reckoning reminds us that social trust should be undermined and that the collectivist culture of T.V should be consigned to the Dark Ages.