An artful tribute that was big on the wow factor
In World’s Tiniest Masterpieces (Channel 4, Sunday), Wolverhampton-born artist Willard Wigan told of “the strange affair of The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party”. Back in 2016, he had been carefully sculpting the scene from Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice sits down to tea with the March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse, and was just about to add its final, most important, figure. But then his mobile rang, and he took a sharp, nasal intake of breath. “Alice got inhaled,” he said, ruefully.
Wigan’s micro artworks, often framed within the eye of a needle, have an audible “wow factor”, which this at times very touching documentary captured. “Wow,” said one gallery visitor, looking through the lens of a microscope at one; “Oh wow,” said the next viewer. “Wowww,” said another.
Wigan’s techniques include using his own eyelashes as tweezers, and attaching shavings of diamonds to hypodermic needles to create tiny scalpels that resemble “Stone Age flint tools”. He creates all his art works by hand, taking advantage of the way that his own pulse causes tiny regular movements to create a jackhammer effect – a technique used when he carved a church from a grain of sand. His works can take up to five weeks to complete and sell for tens of thousands of pounds.
The film-makers had great fun using scale as a visual effect, with Wigan strolling through the city as a giant or navigating table tops like a Lilliputian. There was hyperbole, too. But Wigan’s quiet memories of how his dyslexia had led to him being cruelly humiliated by a teacher, and forced him towards a world where he made insects his friends, spoke even more loudly. He had built ants minuscule houses from balsa wood as a five-yearold. His mother had recognised that his talent was unique and kept one of them.
Over the course of the documentary, Wigan attempted to create the smallest handmade sculpture ever made, in memory of his mother. Other artists work at nanoscopic size but not without machines. Wigan was shown carving a single carpet fibre into a sculpture that would fit inside a hollowed-out strand of his own hair. Watching Wigan struggle to control his movements gave the film an unexpected tension. He had me holding my breath as he battled the tyrannical force of static electricity. This portrait of an extraordinary artist was television with a true sense of wonder.
Farewell then, Reverend Osborne Whitworth. You were an ungodly creature: a philandering foot fetishist and an abuser who turned viewers’ stomachs with your odious behaviour. Now you’ve been beaten with a candlestick and dragged along by a bolting horse until you bounced off some trees and died. It couldn’t have happened to a nastier clergyman.
Poldark (BBC One, Sunday) galloped into the home stretch of its fourth series with its second character death in consecutive episodes, although few will have shed a tear for vile vicar Ossie (Christian Brassington).
Mild-mannered Arthur (Will Merrick) was driven into a murderous rage when he discovered wife Rowella (Esme Coy) had been sleeping with her lecherous brother-in-law. He only knocked the cleric off his mount – but with Ossie’s foot stuck in the stirrup and the horse spooked, it was enough.
Lady Whitworth (Rebecca Front, relishing the chance to play a panto villain) promised not to rest until she found her son’s murderer. A word too for Brassington’s brilliant portrayal. When Whitworth was played by Christopher Biggins in the Seventies, he was dubbed “the most hated man on television”. Brassington has filled his predecessor’s sizeable breeches with aplomb, putting on two stone for the part and bringing the oleaginous character to vivid life. Ossie won’t be missed but Brassington will.
In Westminster, the efforts of Ross Poldark (Aidan Turner) to help the starving poor caught the attention of the Prime Minister (Edward Bennett). Pitt the Younger, meet Poldark the Moodier. Splitting the action between Cornwall and London has caused the drama to sag, with back-and-forth journeys and lovelorn letters becoming repetitive. The parting of two key couples – Ross and Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson), Caroline (Gabriella Wilde) and Dwight Enys (Luke Norris) – has lent a melancholy tinge and mood of foreboding.
Dr Dwight would doubtless prescribe Cornish air – not just for the characters but to rejuvenate the series as a whole.