£20m buys an ex-wife a lot of gold leaf and an easy ride from the BBC
TWENTY million quid buys a lot of fantasies, but it takes a mega-rich imagination to cast yourself as Princess Diana. Iranian-born Lisa Tchenguiz, a 50- something Mayfair lady who looks as though she was sculpted from silicon and diamante by a squadron of plastic surgeons, was borrowing a famous royal phrase to describe her second divorce: ‘There were three people in the marriage at all times.’
Unlike Princess Di, Lisa had been married before, during the Eighties, to Radio 1 DJ Mr ‘ Oooh’ Gary Davies. That split was amicable, she claimed on Millionaires’ Ex-Wives Club (BBC2).
But when Hubbie No. 2 went back to his first wife, Lisa decided she had a certain standard of living to maintain — and instructed her divorce lawyers to demand a £125 million settlement. After a long battle, she accepted £20 million.
It must be hard to scrape by on so little. She has two housekeepers, after all, and a chauffeur on hand around the clock to escort her shopping. Her home is entirely decorated in pink plaster and gold leaf. These things don’t come cheap.
We’re used to seeing these ghastly caricatures of wealthy women on Channel 4, where they can’t get enough of high-heeled harridans with tiny dogs. Every shot, every
RED ALERT OF THE NIGHT: As little Ben’s junkie mother led him away on Girlfriends (ITV), she said: ‘Nowt’s gonna happen to him!’ In a mad melodrama like this one, that’s a guarantee of disaster. Sure enough, he was abducted within the hour.
edit is set up to mock them. But when BBC2 does it, the joke is lost in translation. This documentary was trying so hard to be serious-minded and not to snigger up its sleeve that it ended by being obsequious.
The film- makers didn’t dare suggest that current laws, which prescribe a 50-50 split between husband and wife of the assets accumulated during a marriage, were wrong.
That would be anti-feminist, a heinous offence at the BBC.
They were trapped by their own political correctness. Because they couldn’t criticise Lisa’s money addiction, they had to condone it.
By the end of the hour, she was treating the camera crew like lapdogs, allowing them to scamper round her as she snuggled up to her new boyfriend, an American in the private jet business.
The rest of the show was a depressing recap of Young vs Young, the best known of the super-divorces.
Wronged wife Michelle vowed it wasn’t over — but it clearly is, since her ex died very messily in 2014. Scot Young, rumoured to be a money-launderer for international gangsters, fell from a fourth- storey window and was impaled on railings. Officially, the death was unexplained — but we’ve all seen McMafia. We know how easily crooked financiers can disappear over windowsills.
The other unexplained death, that of a nine-year-old girl in care on Kiri (C4), ought to be far more compelling. But all the sympathy and tension generated in the first episode was wasted as the drama turned into a wordy, preachy piece of bad theatre.
Some of the speeches were as dry and wooden as last month’s Christmas trees — especially a monologue in a brothel, where the chief suspect confronted his father and inexplicably proceeded to recite the man’s own life story back at him.
What they were doing in a backstreet warehouse, with a neon sign promising ‘Find Love Upstairs’, was not fully explained. But with dialogue this rotten, it’s surprising how quickly you can cease to care.
Sarah Lancashire had the worst speech of the lot, a mad harangue to reporters about the iniquity of letting black children go to church and pray to ‘a blue-eyed Jesus’.
She gave it everything, frothing and weeping, and looking every inch a drunken social worker, but acting couldn’t save her. This was toe-curlingly bad.