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.
And the tabloid papers at that. One detail that the programme seemed to find quite ticklingly hilarious was that Shaun had forged these masterworks using tools bought at B&Q. But where exactly would it have expected him to buy his tools? Petherington and Fothergill, Rare, Delicate, Expensive and Posh Toolmakers, by Appointment to The Queen? Ye Olde and Authenticke Art Forger’s Emporium?
While dwelling at length on the Ealing comedy aspects of the story — cue scenes of ordinary Northern folk chuckling over a pint about how one of their own pulled a con trick on them poncy southerners, ee ba gum — it seemed determined to skirt anything that smacked of insight or complexity.
We learnt, for example, that the Greenhalghs had finally been rumbled when an expert noticed that Shaun had got the reins on the horses wrong on an ancient Assyrian tablet. But how exactly had he got them wrong? The programme wouldn’t tell us, as if terrified that the moment the voice-over got into tricky territory like the nuances of 10th-century BC bridle design, the viewers would suddenly go, ‘Well, I’m not watching this poncy intellectual stuff any more. It’s going right over my head.’
Mind you, My Israel (BBC4, Wednesday) had me pretty flummoxed. It was another autobiographical documentary by Yulie Cohen — apparently she has already made three before — provoked by an experience in 1973 when as an El Al stewardess she was nearly killed by a lone Arab terrorist, whom subsequently she has sought to forgive, comprehend and befriend. She now goes on platforms arguing that Israelis are just as culpable as Palestinians, and that empathy and reconciliation are the only way forward if there is ever to be peace in the Holy Land.
Well, quite. You can see why the BBC gives her so much airspace, and she’s undoubtedly a strong, brave, intelligent and very attractive woman. But it seemed to me that there’s a fairly basic truth she fails to grasp when, for example, she urges Israeli mums not to let their children join the armed forces. If they did as she suggests, the state of Israel would be wiped off the map.
My wife liked the programme much more than I did, explaining that this is how women think, and if only we all thought like that instead of in the aggressive, black-and-white way men do the world would be a better place. Apart from one week in every month, presumably.
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