Janet Street-Porter says watching Steve Coogan play Jimmy Savile ‘made my flesh creep’

Janet Street-Porter has shared her struggle in watching the “powerful” yet “upsetting” Jimmy Savile drama The Reckoning.

Steve Coogan stars in the four-part BBC series as presenter Savile, who was exposed as a paedophile in 2012, roughly one year after his death.

The show has been the subject of much discussion and controversy, with some suggesting the show goes too easy on the BBC - something the show’s creators have defended it against.

Discussing The Reckoning on Tuesday’s episode of Loose Women, Street-Porter explained that she had worked with Savile “years ago” at the BBC.

At the time, Street-Porter appeared on a number of shows with Savile and worked as an executive within the “light entertainment department”. While she “never produced any shows with Jimmy Savile”, Street-Porter explained, she did meet “the real” man.

“I could barely watch it, actually,” the presenter said, praising Coogan as a “fine actor”.

“The idea that he reappeared in my living room, that portrayal actually made my flesh creep. I felt sick, actually.. It had a very, very powerful effect on me.”

Street-Porter then referenced a scene in episode one in which Savile lures girls backstage at dancehalls. Having attended similar events in London in her own youth, she added, “there were girls that used to go backstage with the DJ and hung out with the groupies, everybody knows that”.

“But what upsets me about this drama is it doesn’t really add anything to what we already know about Jimmy Savile,” she continued. “What we know now and what we ignored or didn’t want to think about at the time.”

She said that she would have preferred the show to be a documentary, “if we are going to go right through how did this horrible thing happen and no one noticed”.

Ruth Langsford echoed that she had chosen not to watch the show, as the “dramatisation” of the show made it feel like “entertainment”.

During a press screening of The Reckoning, several reporters argued that the drama did not properly interrogate how those working behind-the-scenes at the BBC failed to act despite knowing about Savile’s behaviour.

The BBC’s chief content officer Charlotte Moore said: “I don’t think we shy away from the BBC’s part in this. I think it’s very clear that people who worked closely with him supported his promotion from one show to another [and] had warnings of rumours and people saying, ’I don’t think this is the right thing to do.’ We’re very clear about that.”

Executive producer Jeff Pope added: “We felt the way we dealt with it was the right way. I don’t think that anyone watching this would think, ‘Oh, the BBC come out of this smelling of roses.’ I do think that we hold the BBC to account.”

But in his two-star review of The Reckoning, The Independent’s Nick Hilton wrote: “Whose reckoning is it? Certainly not the BBC’s. Their complicity in shelving a Newsnight investigation into Savile is only mentioned, fleetingly, in a postscript.

“Several BBC executives – former BBC One controller Bill Cotton and Top of the Pops producer Johnnie Stewart, particularly – come out looking like wilfully ignorant patsies, but in most scenes involving the Beeb, there’s a (usually anonymised) woman there to raise some suspicions and exonerate any structural failings.

“And so, The Reckoning ends up feeling like a parade of villainy without a point to make.”