THE RECKONING - FOUR PART DRAMA

I've had two interesting conversations about paedophilia with experts in the subject: one with a barrister specialising in paedophile cases at an event for prospective Tory MPs and the other with a commuting friend who was formerly an extremely senior probation officer.

The barrister told me that paedophilia is not a true chronophilia and should not be regarded as such. He said that paedophilia is not about sexual attraction but about power: paedophiles are psychopaths and all they want in a sexual partner is someone who is physically weak and tiny, fearful, dehumanised and unable to assert themself.

The parole officer had hard-left, über-liberal views about almost everything – except when it came to paedophiles, about whom he had no illusions. He told me "the only way to control a paedophile is to lock them up and throw away the key. They will inevitably keep offending until they are too old and physically frail to do so".

(Interestingly, he had been the parole officer on the notorious Mary Bell case. For those not familiar with it, Bell was a child who killed two younger children and was diagnosed as a psychopath before her trial. Alan, who had worked extensively with her, disagreed with this assessment and had the opinion that both killings had been aggressive chase games that had gone badly wrong. He told me that children should be discouraged from playing those kinds of games as it is hardwired in us as animals to kill or maim the things we have been chasing.)

As such, Savile's behaviour seems to have been motivated by power rather than sex.

However, whilst the show was hugely compelling and Coogan was outstanding as Savile, I thought it significantly editorialised Savile's life. Every sexual encounter he had ended with the girl in question in tears – whilst that may have happened in many of his sexual encounters, there must have also been a significant number of teenage girls who would have been happy to have slept with a man like Savile given his celebrity and close connections with pop stars.

In addition, the show occasionally struck me as slightly mischievous – every teenage girl Savile encountered was played by a very small actress, implying that Savile was an enormously tall and physically imposing man, which he was not (although he was quite strong and muscular). A similar trick was played, and widely commented upon, in the Ike and Tina Turner biopic, in which Ike was portrayed as a huge, muscle-bound hulk looming over a tiny Tina. In reality, whilst certainly a cocaine-fuelled wife-beater, Ike Turner was a fairly short and wiry man whilst Tina was a fit and muscular woman.

Similarly, in the TV series, Savile is specifically linked with the suicide of a teenage girl after he raped her. For some reason, she is depicted as Asian in the film, when in reality she was based on a white girl named Claire McAlpine. In real life, McAlpine stated in her diary that she had been raped by two DJs, but did not name them, and there is considerable doubt as to whether either of them was Savile.

The Savile case was discussed widely on the old TalkPunk board as it unfolded, and it's interesting how the narrative around him has evolved. Initially, when hundreds of complaints started emerging about Savile's sexual conduct, none of them described him as a rapist. They all involved low-level sexual behaviour with girls in their mid-teens: casual groping and kissing; at most handjobs and the occasional blowjob. This led me to speculate as to whether Savile, who seemed to have a deep-seated misogyny, was even capable of performing sexually with a woman.

Of course, none of this speculation changes the fact that Savile was clearly a very active sexual predator who appeared to lead an incredibly empty inner life. He never appeared to have a proper relationship with a woman and lived in a penthouse that he allowed to go to rack and ruin, despite having millions of pounds in the bank. The interior of his home was widely depicted in the media following his death and it is remarkably squalid, tending to confirm the impression that he had deep-seated psychological problems.