Jumping Chaz flash! Charles II was the Mick Jagger of his day
Andrew Grahamdixon, presenter of Art, Passion And Power: The Story Of The Royal Collection (BBC4), doesn’t look like a fine art historian. he has the long, swept-back grey hair and sideburns of an ageing London gangster.
his delivery too lacks that fussy, mimsy tone of the high-pitched professor. instead, he could be a voiceover stand-in on The apprentice: ‘ruling the waves, waiving the rules,’ he growls, ‘Britain’s royal collection — on the rise!’
if you missed this documentary about the Queen’s art treasures, you can catch him again tonight on BBC2, discussing a heist in Stealing Van Gogh. it must be andrew Graham-dixon season on the Beeb.
and he’s good value, because he has the knack essential for an art critic of making us look at paintings in new ways. he doesn’t just run through the dates or allow the camera to study his face as he gazes thoughtfully at canvases.
introducing the windsor Beauties, a gallery of portraits featuring young women all rumoured to have been mistresses of Charles ii, he drew our attention to what made every picture seem so louche: the girls’ eyes, their ‘post-coital gaze’.
and surveying a portrait of the monarch himself, he pointed out: ‘There’s something of the rock star about him — Papa’s got a brand new throne!’
it wasn’t till he said it that the painting came alive — suddenly we were looking at the mick Jagger of the restoration era, showing off his legs in skin-tight strides.
The British, while we might not know much about art, famously know what we like.
The tricky part is explaining why we don’t like something, and Graham-dixon can do that.
he pointed to the naked gods and goddesses, painted by antonio Verrio on the ceiling of a breakfast room at windsor. They weren’t worth a second glance, which is odd: who doesn’t enjoy a naked god or goddess?
‘Boneless bodies and gormless faces,’ said the presenter. ah, yes – i see what he means now. Then he added, rather unnecessarily: ‘Verrio wasn’t verrio goodo.’
Speaking of unnecessary, it was a little suspect that Graham-dixon felt compelled to make an excursion to Venice.
he claimed to be on a quest to discover how some dazzling paintings by Canaletto had ended up in the royal collection.
This investigation turned out to involve nothing more than a gondola ride past a Venice townhouse that once belonged to Canaletto’s agent.
Still, it gave him a chance to wear some tortoiseshell sunglasses that made him look even more like an expat Great Train robber.
night vision goggles were required for The Secret Life Of The Zoo (C4), which focused on night-time activity at Chester’s menagerie. The main event was a bat hunt, rounding up fruit bats making a bid for freedom. The keepers’ equipment was slightly less high-tech than the infra-red camera lens: they just waved big nets on sticks, like Victorian butterfly hunters.
Thanks to advances in heatsensitive cameras, the nocturnal footage on this series is one of its biggest attractions. we’ve seen black rhinos give birth, twice — you’d imagine it can’t be very different from how cows and pigs do it, but rhinos have a technique all of their own.
one mum, Kitani, whirled round like a top till her calf flew into the straw. The other, Zuri, nearly sat on her little chap when he was still on the way out.
Until these new cameras arrived, very few people can have witnessed anything like that.