The 28 Days Later Jimmy Savile gang is a masterstroke

On a writing flourish

Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and the evil Jimmies of ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’

You could use a lot of adjectives about modern screenwriting culture, but I’m not sure one you’d reach for all-too readily is ‘brave’. So many scripts, for page or stage, have been watered down in a kind of attempt to please everybody which ends up pleasing none; this is the classic fate of the British comedy movie, where the radical and disruptive aspects of the original series or sketch show are filed off in the name of mass appeal. With humble exceptions – recent Amazon series ‘Pluribus’ comes to mind, and that’s in part down to its writer Vince Gilligan having carte blanche from previously creating one of the most successful series of all time – it’s rare to see modern writers being given the opportunity to take a swing.

It is with excitement and even relief then that I found that recent zombie flick ‘28 Days Later: The Bone Temple’ to contain a plot point which was a genuine artistic risk. An actual ‘How did they get away with that?’ A daring idea that got through, something that a standard script reader – the kind I occasionally managed to extract a few words of comments on my own scripts from – would have responded to with ‘This is highly offensive, strike it out.’

I am talking of course about the gang of Jimmy Saville impersonators headed by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, played by Jack O’Connell, who weave a trail of death and destruction across northwest England in the name of ‘charity’. It’s a writing flourish which combines both precise satire and imaginative horror in a way which compounds the impact of both. It is a real gamble from screenwriter Alex Garland. I think it works.

The gang turned up at the end of the previous ‘28 Years Later’ film where I didn’t like them at all. I thought they provided an odd and jerky contrast with the rest of the movie which had until then basically felt like a family drama with zombies thrown in. They needed their own space, and I’m glad to say that ‘The Bone Temple’ more than provides it for them. From the moment in the opening scene of the new film where a stab wound to the leg pierces an artery, leading to one of the Jimmies dying an agonising death, we are in a world of really intense horror, of a place with real-life and visceral consequences. If you’re going to invoke a figure as wicked as Saville, you need to be in that kind of milieu, otherwise you’re in the realm of the many comedians I’ve seen sabotage their set by dropping a casual reference to a weighty subject and souring the mood.

For my many North American readers and four in Pakistan, Jimmy Saville was a British children’s entertainer who hosted a show called ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ where he did his best to make the requests of children come true¹. He was also massively active for charitable causes with fun runs and fundraising drives. After his death, it swiftly emerged that he was a notorious paedophile and abuser and that this seemed to have pretty much been an open secret at the time across British institutions such as the BBC and NHS. Therefore, aside from the specific horrors of his case and what he did to his victims, he’s a symbol of a certain kind of rotten and duplicitous Englishness and the idea that every British television 1970s’ children’s entertainer was later revealed a paedophile.

So what’s he doing in this film?

In part, invoking Savile is intended as further condemnation of him, saying, ‘In a zombie-infested Britain, the likes of Jimmy Savile will find a natural home.’ The human evil in the film outstrips the zombie evil – the zombies are behaving without free will, but O’Connell’s vile cult are choosing wickedness and Saville is a great symbol of that voluntary wickedness. Of course, you could make the opposite point, that Saville’s notoriety is being sleazily exploited for shock, and that some American cinemagoers have dressed up as Saville to attend screenings gets us into uneasy (tho also uneasily comic) territory. They probably shouldn’t do that but, on the other hand, culture needs a safe space to successfully pillory and pantomime its evildoers too.

Why I really like it is that it successfully works at both a satirical and story level. That’s a space which confuses people, particularly screenwriting experts, when you can’t quite say something is meant seriously or in jest; that you as a writer are deliberately offering in the uncomfortable space in between. The truth can only really get away with it when it works, and in my view this does (tho others have dissented). Not least because O’Connell plays it brilliantly, as do the rest of his gang; they are frightened and he has the terrified intensity of an improvising cult leader dependent for his survival on keeping his narratives compelling.

The scene where he and Ralph Fiennes’ doctor Ian Kelson - the counterbalancing force of ‘creative goodness’ in the film – discuss the need to convince the cult of his Satanic parentage has an almost medieval air, not the least for occurring outside, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath who ‘into the feeldes wente’. The film is taking the figure of Saville and using him as a symbol of a collapsed society or one which deserves to be punished, which is always to a degree the charm of post-apocalyptic films are about, that it offers reassurance that society’s destruction when it comes will have been deserved. And of course it is a very culturally specific English symbol too; it hasn’t been watered down into a more familiar American monster. Savile is very much one of our own and northern England is the soil which spawned him.

Mark Kermode has said that in the world of the film, with the virus outbreak occurring in the 1999, it was likely that the truth of Saville never came out. This is a misreading I think; the idea is more that the cult gravitate towards Saville precisely because they knew something was wrong about him, that they intuited him as a nexus of evil, and even if they don’t know the extent of their icon’s crimes – or even for the younger members perhaps who he was at all – the audience very much do and can understand why Savile has been chosen. It removes the script purely from its world of zombies and chases and offers an extra satirical level; there is no way to include such a specifically early 21^st century British monster and not invite a sociocultural reading of the events in the film. And of course Britain’s isolation from the rest of the world in the series, leaving the country to embrace every random bad idea going might just be a fairly decent metaphor for another recent event in UK political history.

The UK is a funny place to write about these days. It feels a pinched place, a country long past its cultural height which nonetheless has some wonderful cultural assets. A lot of contemporary British satire is that chummy, politics as caper Iannucci mode (even ‘The Death of Stalin’ is basically a film about Westminster), by now a relic of another age. What Garland is going for here is rawer, nastier, more committed to be also in Chaucer’s words ‘the smylere with the knyf under the cloke.’ It’s part of a great tradition too of British weird, from Swift to Python to Chris Morris, where the satire is not just dry and abstract but really lived and unrelenting in its imaginative realisation. It’s a sort of committing to the bit, where you have a funny idea but you take its embodiment almost viscerally seriously as a scene, the space where the comic meets the visionary. Think Mr Creosote.

Making an evil serial killer gang of Britain’s most notorious paedo is an honourable contribution to that tradition, and I hope the film’s box-office, which has been patchy until now, is sufficient to embolden further swings. Even if not, I’ll treasure this remarkable sequel. I’d even say that the sheer nastiness of that vile Saville gang makes me feel a little more optimistic about a country which is at least honest enough not to have any illusions about its own place in the world. We may be sinking giggling into the sea but at least the laughter is aimed squarely in our own direction.

1. By way of anecdote from my own past, I wrote a letter to Sir Jim myself as a young child asking to ‘meet Thomas the Tank Engine’. I was somewhat disappointed when my parents informed me we now had to wait and that writing a letter didn’t mean you got to go on the programme the same night. Probably a lucky escape in retrospect.