Sky has the TV talent contest down to a fine art
Landscape Artist of the Year is the most popular programme on Sky Arts, along with sister show Portrait Artist of the Year, and it’s not hard to see why. The format is familiar –a Bake Off-style talent contest, with challenges and judges – but rendered in such a gentle way that you emerge after an hour feeling positively rested.
Even Stephen Mangan’s puns seem charming. The finalists were given the task of painting a view of Covent Garden from the terrace of the Royal Opera House. “Who will put the art in Travi-art-a? Who will orchestrate a win? Who’s worth putting a tenor on?” asked Mangan, all legitimately terrible lines and yet I happily continued watching. That’s what this programme does to a person’s psyche.
The prize, though: a £10,000 Science Museum commission to depict “Orkney’s vital role in the sustainable energy revolution”. Have you ever heard anything so soul-sapping?
More than 2,000 hopefuls applied for this series, and were whittled down to three. The finalists – Monica Popham, Denise Fisk and Kristina Chan – have very different styles. Popham, recently settled in the UK after living in Gibraltar, specialises in tightly cropped paintings of buildings bathed in sunlight. That made her a good fit for the final task, which took in the façades and rooftops of Covent Garden piazza. Fisk seems happier when there are no buildings in sight, preferring to paint trees and grass. Chan’s work is more ethereal, carrying a hint of strangeness.
In addition to the Covent Garden scene, each had to produce a painting based on where they live or work. Kristina sketched foxes on a roof outside her window. Denise painted her garden. Monica chose her street in Guildford, and in their comments the judges hinted that they had found their winner, praising her for producing “the most accomplished shadow in the history of Landscape Artist of the Year”.
And Monica did win – an odd choice, on the face of it, with her focus on urban landscapes and compositions that cropped out the sky. But her work was the most distinctive (and my favourite).
A second programme followed her to Orkney and was unforgivably dreary, less about Monica’s style and more about research into renewable energy. The poor woman had to spend her time touring a tidal energy converter and politely listening to people talk about wind turbines, which must have been as thrilling for her as it was for viewers. Her final canvas was lovely, though, and she should have a bright career ahead.
Netflix true-crime documentaries have conditioned us to expect a big twist. By contrast, Dead in the Water (Prime Video) is a straightforward retelling, but that doesn’t make it any less gripping. A young British couple, Chris Farmer and Peta Frampton, went missing in Belize in 1978. He was a newly qualified doctor and she was a lawyer; in the spirit of Seventies adventure, they had taken off around the world.
In a bar, they met Duane Boston, an American who offered to sail them down the coast of Belize on the boat he shared with his two sons, aged 11 and 13. Their bodies were later found in the waters off Guatemala. They had drowned, and there were signs of torture.
This is a three-part series. We discover the truth of what happened in episode two from Vince Boston, one of Duane’s children, who witnessed the murders. One of the strands running through the documentary is the mistakes made by the British police. When he reached adulthood, Vince tried to do the right thing and tell the authorities what he had seen.
In an awful coincidence, Peta shared her name with the famous musician Peter Frampton, so the Scotland Yard call handler dismissed Vince as a hoaxer when he attempted to report it. More damningly, the Greater Manchester Police force that had originally handled the case had lost the records, meaning that there was no trace of Chris or Peta on file. Thank heavens for a detective who, decades later, dug out copies he had stored in his garden shed.
Episode three details how the killer was eventually caught via Facebook – a 1970s crime that could finally be solved in the internet age. But while the investigation is compelling, it is Chris’s mother, Audrey Farmer, who will remain in your thoughts. Now in her 90s, she speaks of her son with such dignity and clarity.
She hadn’t wanted him to go to Central America: “I don’t think many parents would. But you can’t clip a kid’s wings; you’ve got to let them fly.” At the end, she reminisces about a moment they shared when he was a boy, and it is the most beautiful thing.
Landscape Artist of the Year ★★★
Dead in the Water ★★★★