Real-life dramas of people back from the dead put fiction to shame
IMPOSTER: THE MAN WHO CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD
Channel 4, Monday, 9pm THE GULLSPANG MIRACLE: A NORDIC MYSTERY
BBC Four, Tuesday, 10pm CHANGING MY MIND
RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm
Aman wakes from a coma in Scotland after catching Covid to find himself arrested and charged with being an American fugitive wanted by the FBI after faking his own death.
Arthur Knight claimed to have been born in Ireland and to have run away from an institution here to live in London as a teenager. His English wife, Miranda, insisted her husband had never even been to the US.
A story like this can only go one of two ways. It’s either going to be an horrific miscarriage of justice, or a tale of punishment catching up with a very bad apple.
It quickly became clear that it wasn’t the former. Arthur Knight really is the serial fraudster and rapist Nick Rossi, aka Nicholas Alahverdian, originally from Rhode Island but wanted in four states for the alleged rape of two women.
What emerged in Imposter: The Man Who Came Back from the Dead was a genuinely jawdropping story of someone who had advocated as a teenager for the rights of children in care before it emerged that the things he said were being done to him were actually what he was doing to the other kids. He grew up to be so lacking in moral integrity that he once sued one of his own victims for defamation and emotional damage, going so far as to compare the things she had said about him to Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 terrorist attack in New York.
Over four hours – three without the ad breaks, for those fortunate enough to subscribe to Channel 4 – the twists and turns in the tale just kept getting weirder; and while it did meander a bit in places, as well as leaving many details frustratingly unclear, the cast of largerthan-life characters (including Rossi’s stepfather, who was once America’s No 1 Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator), was so compelling that it utterly won me over.
I did have some quibbles. The music was inappropriately jaunty at times, considering the dark subject matter. I also don’t like the now common practice on TV of getting real-life victims to reenact traumatic incidents in their lives, such as a car chase involving Rossi’s first wife, for the camera. These people are not actors; their words should be enough.
But this was great storytelling from the outset and maintained the tension to the very end as the film turned finally to asking how deeply Miranda was implicated in her husband’s double-dealing.
Rossi himself was extradited back to the US in January, with a possibility of life imprisonment if found guilty. He continues to insist he is Arthur Knight.
If that wasn’t drama enough for one week, there was also The Gullspang Miracle: A Nordic Mystery, which was another long documentary with an incredible story to tell.
This one was about two sisters from Norway who bought an apartment in a small Swedish town, only to find it was owned by a woman who looks exactly like another sister who died years earlier. She even shares the same birthday with the dead woman.
DNA tests initially confirm that the women are indeed related, and a strange tale starts to emerge of twins separated as babies during the Nazi occupation of Norway and brought up in very different social backgrounds.
What’s meant to be a happy story soon turns sour, however, as tensions grow between the secular and well-off long-lost twin and her newly found, less well-off, religious family. Doubts are raised about whether she’s even related to them at all, while she herself becomes convinced that the late sister didn’t die by suicide, as thought, but was murdered.
Truth be told, none of these strands are satisfactorily resolved. “We’ll probably never get the answer to our questions,” one concedes at the end of the film.
It was undoubtedly absorbing. To reveal more would give too much away, however.
Suffice to say it’s now available to watch on the BBC iPlayer.
The documentary does start off quite annoyingly, but it’s worth sticking with to the end.
Depression is a common trait among comedians. There’s even a name for it – “sad clown paradox”. Studies have found that those whose job is to make other people laugh are more likely to be “angry, suspicious and depressed”, and also self critical, than people in other fields.
In Changing My Mind, standup comedian PJ Gallagher sought to get to the bottom of his own struggles with depression, as well as checking out potential remedies for what ails him, from mindfulness to medicine to wild sea swimming.
Along the way, he offered some important advice, most of which could be summed up in the words: “You have to start talking.”
Too many people, men in particular, are ashamed and embarrassed about admitting they need help.
“What a load of b ***** ks that is,” PJ said pithily.
The programme was too brief to do more than scratch the surface and the soaring music at the end probably gave a false shape to the narrative, as if to suggest that all was now hunky dory in Gallagher’s head as he continued the journey to understand his condition better.
Everyone’s story is different. What works for one wouldn’t necessarily work for another.
As the continuation of a conversation that needs to be had, Changing My Mind arguably did what it set out to do; but it would have been even more commendable had it tried to go that little bit further and deeper.