Janet Street-Porter was’sick’ after witnessing the scathing Jimmy Savile movie featuring Steve Coogan.
The Loose Women star had worked with Savile multiple times throughout her career, years before his heinous crimes were made public after his death in 2011.
Disgraced The Reckoning, a BBC drama starring Alan Partridge actor Coogan, exposes BBC broadcaster Savile’s serial misdeeds as a child sex abuser and sex criminal.
The series was contentious even before it aired, but with the first episode airing on Monday night, the Loose Women panellists were ready to discuss it on Tuesday’s show.
Street-Porter stated she could ‘barely watch it,’ believing Savile had’re-appeared in my living room’ while the programme aired, complimenting Coogan as ‘a terrific performance.’
She noted that ‘years ago,’ she had appeared on several shows with Savile through the BBC, and ‘worked as an executive in the night entertainment department’ where Savile made much of his shows.
While she ‘never produced any shows with Jimmy Savile,’ she went on, ‘I have met the real Jimmy Savile … that portrayal made my flesh creep.;
‘I felt sick, actually,’ she admitted. ‘It had a very, very powerful effect on me.’
She referenced a scene in the new series in which girls were lured backstage by the paedophile, and said in her own youth, at dancehalls in London, ‘there were girls that used to go backstage with the DJ and hung out with the groupies, everybody knows that.’
Street-Porter went on to explain that she didn’t believe a BBC drama was the correct thing to do since it ‘doesn’t add anything’ to the awful subject, and that she ‘would have preferred a documentary.’
Coogan defended the play earlier this year when it was received with criticism.
‘It is controversial and I understand that,’ Coogan told Radio Times.
‘The BBC are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and I believe the correct choice is to be damned if they do. Broadly, it’s better to talk about something than not.
‘The team had the right attitude and it was done with the cooperation of survivors.’
He went on to say that he felt the show will ‘vindicate itself’ when it was televised.
The Reckoning airs on BBC One, with all four episodes released on BBC iPlayer; Loose Women airs weekdays from 12.30pm on ITV and ITVX.
