Coogan: My Savile horror in morque

Star found TV drama scene 'disturbing'

- NICOLA METHVEN

ACTOR Steve Coogan says he had to put his "overwhelming sense of revulsion" to one side to play the serial paedophile, rapist and abuser, Jimmy Savile.

The Alan Partridge star takes the lead role in the BBC's four-part drama, The Reckoning - which its writer has called the "posthumous trial of Savile".

In one disturbing scene, the sick DJ, who died in 2011 aged 84, is shown molesting a body in the morgue at Stoke Mandeville hospital.

Coogan needed six "looks" to portray Savile between his 40s and his 80s, and even had to veto one aspect of the scene as it was so vile.

But he told how he still found it difficult to film as his character puts his hand under a sheet covering the body.

Coogan, 57, said: "What can you say? It's as disturbing as it looks.

"There's a tension between sharing too much of Savile's offences and it being grotesque, or sugar-coating them, which is also wrong, so we don't see the horror of what he did.