Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Faking it

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Artful Codgers (Channel 4); My Israel (BBC4)

As budgets fall and standards slip, it’s inevitable that TV is going to get worse and worse and that the job of the TV critic in trying to shame the bosses into arresting this decline will become more important than ever. But this doesn’t make me feel happy. It just — like so many things in the modern world, from biofuels to ‘best practice’ — makes me want to kill myself. I mean, I’d much rather have wall-to-wall brilliant TV and a near-meaningless job function than rubbish TV and a vital corrective role.

After that portentous start, you’re probably expecting me to have found something truly abysmal to review. But I haven’t. The Artful Codgers (Channel 4, Thursday) was perfectly OK TV, quite entertainingly put together, and an agreeable enough way to pass an hour. What depresses me, though, is to think how much better it would have been if it had chosen to dig a bit deeper, instead of skittering around the surface of the story going, ‘Tee hee hee! Isn’t this funny and quirky? Do you geddit? Do you get how funny and quirky this story is?’

And I agree, it is a funny, quirky story. It’s the one about the Greenhalghs — father George, 84, mother Olive, 83, and younger son Shaun, 47 — the family from a Bolton housing estate, described on the programme as the greatest forgers in art history.

For nearly two decades, they managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the art establishment with an astonishingly versatile series of convincing fakes you’d never conceive could have been knocked off in a shed by a man with no artistic training. Among their triumphs was persuading Bolton Museum to stump up £440,000 for a ‘lost’ Egyptian statue called the ‘Armarna Princess’, selling an equally ‘lost’ Roman silver plate to the British Museum for £100,000 and creating a Gauguin faun so compelling that it formed the centrepiece of a learned TV art disquisition by Waldemar Januszczak.

With a yarn like that you’d think you couldn’t go wrong, and maybe that was the documentary’s problem. It dutifully assembled all the key players — the (not desperately communicative) Greenhalghs, the investigating coppers, the amused neighbours, the dealers and experts gamely putting their hands up to explain with a smile how they’d been duped — and spliced in all relevant footage, like the Queen admiring the ‘Armana Princess’ in its new Bolton display case. What it failed to do, though, was to take the story significantly further than the one we’d already read in the papers.

1 | 2 Next page

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Making sense

Ursula Buchan

If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment.

Value for money

Alan Judd

How far will the proposed road tax changes influence what we actually buy in the new car market? Not as much, perhaps, as the government likes to think.