Faking it | 17 May 2008

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.