Mcmafia finally makes the grade as a jet-setting drama
So now we know: absolute power corrupts absolutely. The absorbing finale of Mcmafia (BBC One, Sunday) fast-tracked Alex Godman to the pole position of apex predator. What has often looked like an accidental flirtation with criminality was transformed into the real thing. Butter practically froze in Alex’s mouth as he made his chilling pitch. Godman by name, by nature not so much.
Mcmafia was billed as a finessed slice of deeply researched nonfiction. But it also had to make the grade as jet-setting drama. To massage up the pulse rate the script sometimes played God: when Alex sent his bodyguard away at the wrong moment, say, or when creepy Antonio (Caio Blat) turned up just as Rebecca was (miraculously) discharged from hospital.
Other corners were cut. When did Alex find time to type up that fat contractual document? What did the police do about the body in Rebecca’s pad? What the hell happened to Femi’s lines? On the plus side, Alex’s implausible struggles with Russian, the cause of much vexing bilingual dialogue, finally proved useful when he heard his death sentence pronounced, triggering a hectic chase sequence which injected a welcome late burst of pace.
If this was James Norton’s audition for 007, he wore the suit and pulled the trigger efficiently. But who could root for such a cold fish? The vanilla romance with his weepily credulous fiancée Rebecca (Juliet Rylance) made it difficult to credit the stricken look which flitted across his hardening face in the final shot. Having bid a sentimental farewell to conscience in his high-rise childhood home, it was no more bother for Alex to ignore Rebecca than to cut Antonio (the latter a most satisfying comeuppance).
What made Mcmafia really sing was Alex’s Oedipal tussle with his father and his rival. There was always the temptation to wish a plague on both their houses, but Merab Ninidze as mobster Vadim and Aleksey Serebryakov as papa Dimitri exuded such fiery intensity that it was impossible not to be stirred by their doom. They at least weren’t anaemic economists, unlike Alex and his new technocratic partners in crime. According this enlightening if cheerless fable, the boring men in suits will inherit the earth. Heaven help us.
In a fantasy world where I commissioned arts documentaries, I’d send a crack reporter into the crannies of the art world to expose the true stories behind exhibition loans. One colourful director once told me (off the record) that luring works from some young democracies involved inducements such as German cars and “dancing girls”.
No such tactics, one assumes, were deployed for the latest hang at the Royal Academy, as seen in Charles I’s
Treasures Reunited (BBC Two, Saturday). Many of the exhibits belong to Her Majesty the Queen, who doesn’t do bribes. And yet, just for a moment, there was a look on the inscrutable face of Blaise Ducos, a curator at the Louvre in Paris, as he recalled being asked to loan van Dyck’s Charles I in the Hunting Field. “Of course, we were slightly taken aback!” he conceded. Behind that diplomatic mask you could imagine a delicious subtext writhing to be set free.
Instead, this was a sprightly primer on the creation, dispersal and reunification of our beheaded king’s treasures. It was a bit of a hodgepodge. Some speakers spoke to someone off camera. Sometimes Brenda Emmanus got curators to explain a work of art, or walk her through a palace. Her loveliest encounter was with an American collector who, for nearly 30 years, enjoyed a daily dialogue with Orazio Gentileschi’s Head of a Woman. Waldemar Januszczak was eloquent on (a) Rubens and (b) regicide.
A lot of these works were practically contemporary: for Charles I read Charles Saatchi, buying up all those Young British Artists. It would have been good to know the current value of the 25 grand the King coughed up for the collection of Mantua’s indigent Gonzaga dukes. Ditto the four quid you could get a Rembrandt for when the Protectorate sold off the lot.
It wasn’t all talking heads. We also saw how to move a vast van Dyck, roll up a Raphael tapestry, restore a Reni. Please can we see more of Desmond Shawe-taylor, surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and purveyor of patrician wit? “The prince overcame my modesty,” said Rubens when persuaded to sell Charles a self-portrait. “I should think Rubens’s modesty would be fairly easy to overcome,” said Shawe-taylor. Touché.
Mcmafia
Charles I’s Treasures Reunited