Stealing Van Gogh proves to be a real work of art
T here was something intriguingly weird about Stealing Van Gogh
(BBC Two). Picture, if you can, Orla Guerin fronting a three-parter on Wagner, or Jon Sopel exploring the glories of Gainsborough. “I don’t often get mixed in the world of organised crime,” reported Andrew Graham-dixon, all too conscious that his face doesn’t fit in Mcmafia land. “It’s not every day,” he repeated later, “that I find myself in the back of a police car.”
The art historian is no stranger to playing slightly out of position. His art ’n’ grub tours with Giorgio Locatelli yoke together two branches of Italophilia. But Graham-dixon unpacking the long story of a criminal investigation into the theft of two works from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam called for tools he tends not to keep in his box.
Much of his storytelling wouldn’t wash on a current affairs programme. He’d extravagantly point off camera to indicate his next destination. After an interview with a cop or a prosecutor, he’d pause to parse the new information as if evaluating a portrait. He even shamelessly resorted to gossip. “I’ve heard a lot of rumours,” he practically drooled, “about policemen dressed up as Neapolitan pimps with blondes on their arm.”
It wasn’t all reportage. Now and then Graham-dixon would pause before a canvas and let rip with one of those perfumed arias, all bel canto vowels and full monty dynamics. Try that on Panorama and they’d tell him to dial it down and, while he was at it, do something about his silvered mane, which swirled and flapped like the parasurfing sails behind him when he visited a Dutch beach once painted by van Gogh.
In the end, this was a good news story. The paintings were found not in an oligarch’s duplex but under the floorboards of a Neapolitan kitchen owned by the father of a drug lord hoping to use them as plea-bargaining chips. The bathos of it, and the indignity. They weren’t too damaged. “It’s actually in really good nick,” Graham-dixon told a polite Dutch restorer who can’t have understood the idiom. (For the record, the man who nicked it is in the nick.)
I
s Kiri (Channel 4) trying to do too much? After its intriguing and deftly crafted opener, something odd happened to it in the second episode: the characters started speechifying. It was as if writer Jack Thorne was adding captions to the script which explained what the unfolding narrative was unable to clarify. In this third episode the commitment to naturalism continued to unravel.
Alice (Lia Williams), it was revealed, had trysts with a hunky lover in an obligatorily spacious pad. He told her how turned on he was to see her on the news. Would a grieving mother really have tolerated such ghastly insensitivity? Then her son Si (Finn Bennett) burst in as she showered to inform her of his sexting antics. “Sorry, I thought that would be funny,” he said as he ripped her towel off. Si has been an awkward and untrustworthy creep from the start, so why is this behaviour so difficult to credit? Ditto his feeble father’s implausible offer to admit to murdering his adopted daughter.
The story of a black child’s murder on an unsupervised visit to her birth grandparents cannot bear the load of all that Thorne is conscientiously piling onto it. One scene seemed to admit as much, in which Kiri’s grieving grandfather Tobi (Lucian Msamati) proudly rejected the effort of a lawyer to turn the investigation into a story about racial grievance.
Meanwhile, the plight of Miriam, the social worker under investigation, was consigned to a sidebar, which sadly meant seeing less of Sarah Lancashire. Si did go around to her house but we weren’t shown their encounter: it was a dramatic contrivance to engineer a heavyweight showdown between Miriam and Alice. “Mum gets really fiercely articulate when she’s angry,” advised Si, like a one-man Greek chorus.
There was editorialising everywhere you looked. There were two separate references to characters renouncing bread, as if symbolically denying themselves the redemption of the Eucharist. Oh, give it a rest, you wanted to say when DI Mercer, the black detective played by Wunmi Mosaku, told Si he got under her skin. And yet, for all the flaws of a halfbaked whodunit, it’s still hard to tear your gaze away from this vauntingly ambitious drama.
Stealing Van Gogh Kiri