The greatest television drama of the past decade was written without a drop of ink from a screenwriter’s pen. The revelations sparked by Panorama’s aborted investigation into Jimmy Savile triggered the extraordinary chain of events which led to a number of household names being accused of similar crimes. Cuddly faces of the nation’s youth were swept from prime-time to D-wing. Some were brought to justice after decades, others were dragged into the mess without justification. So how do you dramatise the Savile story? The Rolf Harris story? The Stuart Hall story? The answer, says writer Jack Thorne, is you don’t. You fictionalise it.
Thorne – currently riding high in the West End and the bestseller charts as the writer of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – has written National Treasure, a kind of fictional history as the Yewtree panic begins to recede, for the general public at least, into memory.
Robbie Coltrane stars as Paul Finchley, part of a slightly past-it comedy double act who’s still well known enough to have his catchphrases yelled to him in the street. When Finchley is accused of historical sexual abuse offences, his world – and his family’s (Julie Walters plays his wife, Andrea Riseborough his troubled daughter) – falls apart.
Thorne has written about rape and sexual abuse in This Is England as well as on stage, but creating the first post-Yewtree drama was perhaps a more sensitive process – taking in not just the complexities of prosecuting a historical case, but the actions of the police, the media circus and the understandably hazy memories of the victims.
“It’s amazing how brave people are when you talk to them about these things,” says Thorne. “What makes these cases so hard to convict is that it does come down to ‘he said, she said’, and that’s inflated in historical cases. I’d speak to people who’d say they were pretty sure it happened on such and such a date, but they weren’t prepared to say absolutely. And when you read transcripts from these cases, the way prosecutors trip people up is by trying to get specific on the details.”
Thorne hopes National Treasure will also explore the morality of how the Yewtree accusations played out in public. He cites the case of Paul Gambaccini, who was cleared of all charges. “We wanted to do something that told the story of the muddy middle. Of the fact that the police believe Paul Gambaccini has to be prosecuted in public, because it allows other people to come forward – but the result is that Paul Gambaccini has his life ruined. But if you don’t ruin his life, there’s a chance that people who’ve had their lives ruined are still out there. It’s a really, really tricky area.”
Thorne insists National Treasure is no roman à clef though, but a fiction in the best tradition of dramas which explore doubt and leave viewers unsure where the truth lies. While writing the show, he watched Channel 4’s Boy A (about a child murderer released anonymously back into society as an adult) and Rowan Joffe’s paedophile drama Secret Life. “They were able to tell stories without judgement. The important thing is to pose the questions, not suggest the answers.”
• National Treasure starts tonight at 9pm on Channel 4.
