A horribly compelling fairy tale that became a nightmare
Never cross a Russian oligarch. This might seem obvious, but if you’re blinded by love and Chanel these things can need spelling out. The Countess and the Russian Billionaire (BBC Two) was the story of Alexandra Tolstoy, a character best described as hopelessly romantic. First, this nicely spoken boardingschool girl married a penniless Uzbek horseman and discovered that life in a grotty Russian flat isn’t the stuff of dreams. Then she met Sergei Pugachev, otherwise known as “Putin’s banker’’. For a while, things were fabulous. And then the fairy tale turned very, very bad.
The documentary-makers say this film began as the tale of an oligarch standing up to Vladimir Putin – Pugachev was fighting back after having £1 billion of assets frozen during a legal battle with the Kremlin – but it was also a study of a relationship gone sour. And it was horribly compelling.
There is rich, and then there is the kind of rich that makes you dispatch your private jet to pick up a new radiator for your latest house renovation. The family had a comfortable home in Chelsea. “And then we bought the house next door.
I don’t know why, because we didn’t really need it,” shrugged Tolstoy. Then there was the chateau above the Bay of Nice, the Herefordshire estate, the $40 million Caribbean villa where the family would decamp each spring with staff in tow. It was like flicking through the pages of Hello! magazine, except instead of a soap star it was a businessman with a price on his head. It didn’t seem to be a fun life, but an empty one.
Whether the film-makers were trying to paint Tolstoy as a spoiled airhead or not – did they ask her to talk endlessly about the trappings of wealth, or did she volunteer it? – she came across as not terribly bright. But as the couple’s lives became consumed by bodyguards, surveillance and death threats, that beautiful chateau began to resemble a prison. There was something surreal about seeing Tolstoy’s parents, living an ordinary existence in Oxfordshire, discussing their daughter’s dubious life choices.
When Pugachev went into exile in the South of France, Tolstoy refused to join him, and things turned toxic. Tolstoy’s bad decisions included appearing on a tacky Russian television show, in which Pugachev coldly dismissed their relationship and accused her of being after money and fame. The people deserving of our sympathy here, it hardly needs to be said, are the children caught up in it, who now have this documentary to serve as a record of their early years.
There was something so incongruous about Ade Edmondson playing a monstrous villain that to watch him in Save Me Too (Sky Atlantic) was riveting. Unfortunate for the viewer, then, that he has been killed off. But with the discovery of Gideon Charles’s body, we were plunged into whodunit territory, with his wife, Jennifer (Lesley Manville) the prime suspect.
Manville was at the centre of this instalment, as she came to terms with the painful realisation that her husband was a paedophile and the life she’d lived had been a sham. Manville is so good in this role, as a woman trapped in a nightmare: horrified by revelations about her husband and mortified by the court case splashed all over the press.
The one weakness in Save Me Too, and its predecessor, is that the drama focuses so strongly on those destroyed by the fallout of the crime that it doesn’t give us quite enough on the crime itself. I don’t mean the gruesome details; but who exactly was Charles? Why does this case merit being on the front page? And if it is national news, why is Nelly (Lenny James) the only person investigating the suspected abduction of his 13-yearold daughter by a sex trafficking ring?
But the performances, and the atmosphere that James has created as star and writer, make up fo r the shortcomings. Nelly and his ex, Claire (Suranne Jones), are caught in a terrible limbo, grieving yet refusing to believe the worst, struggling not to fall apart. “You’re lighting candles for my kid and she is not dead,” Nelly castigates his friends in the pub. The Palm Tree, with its motley collection of regulars (Stephen Graham and Thomas Coombes among them), gives the show its heart despite the bleakness of the plot. James has reportedly said there may be a third series, but I’m not sure he could sustain this level of intensity. It would be a shame to push this superlative drama beyond its limits.
The Countess and the Russian Billionaire ★★★★ Save Me Too ★★★★