CHEMISTRY?

We’re not faking that!

‘Fiona gets things done. She’s my battering ram’ PHILIP MOULD

Sitting with BBC1’s Fake Or Fortune? presenters Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould is an extraordinary thing. The chemistry between them fizzes like a test tube in a year seven science experiment. For example, when Fiona joins us following our photoshoot. Her hair is thick with hairspray and she can’t wait to brush it out. She says she feels she should be ‘tied up with a bow’.

Philip eyes her appreciatively. ‘It looks lovely,’ he says. ‘Very Rococo.’ He’s referring to the 18th-century art movement when painters decorated their canvasses with cherubs and myths of love. Philip is, of course, a hugely respected art expert. He’s also a lover of all things rural. Fiona bought a second home in the Oxfordshire countryside shortly before the first series of Fake Or Fortune? was filmed five years ago.

‘It’s a shared passion of ours. We love our escape, don’t we?’ says Philip, looking at Fiona with the joy one might feel upon finding a Monet in the attic. ‘ What’s really good though is we’ve worked together for so long that, rather like a long- term relationship, there’s an ease and pleasurable fluency about the sort of discussions and thoughts we have. I spent a lot of time trying to encourage her to get a place in the countryside.’

‘I’ve never lived in the country and never wanted to,’ says Fiona. ‘But I feel now...’ she sort of mentally hugs herself and beams. ‘I find it the most wonderful way to switch off, being out among nature, walking my dog, gardening, which I love. We spend every weekend there. One day we’d like to live there.’

The ‘we’, of course, is her husband Nigel Sharrocks, an advertising executive she’s been happily married to for 22 years this month, and their two children Sam, 18, and Mia, 14. Fiona and her daughter ride together each weekend. It turns out riding is another of Fiona and Philip’s shared passions. ‘I greatly encouraged her in the early days,’ says Philip. ‘If you film with someone for 40 or 50 days a year you chit-chat all the time. We used to talk about it the way we used to talk about dogs. I have a spaniel so we’d to swap dog stories and horse stories. I may have influenced her a bit. It’s rather like overseeing a kid’s school career. There’s the equivalent of that GCSE moment, when you can comfortably gallop – the moment you can leave the ground. Now I’m trying to encourage Fiona to have a meadow.’

She shoots him a sort of ‘fat chance’ look: ‘It sounds too much like hard work.’ To which Philip pulls a mock wounded face. ‘To me the whole point of being in the countryside as opposed to being in suburbia is that things erupt naturally through the ground. The most exciting moment in my life was when a bee orchid came up of its own accord. It was about as exciting as discovering a Gainsborough. It just suddenly came up from nowhere. What it loves is disturbed ground. It was this feeling that God is in his heaven and all is well on earth. I had been gifted with this thing.’

‘ That was not the most exciting moment in your life,’ says Fiona, with a challenging tilt of the chin.

‘ One of the most exciting moments,’ he concedes with a look that’s part of their private shorthand.

To suggest this is anything more than the easy banter of close friendship would be rather like passing off a drawing by a five-year-old as a Lowry, but it is part of what keeps us glued to Fake Or Fortune? as these ‘big friends’ (Philip’s words) set about verifying the authenticity of works purportedly by the greatest painters. Their investigations take them to the most respected art institutions in the world, and in past series they’ve uncovered Turners and discovered a Rembrandt that was looted by the Nazis, which they returned to its rightful owner. The coming series begins with them trying to prove a painting of a man in a cravat is one of the first pictures painted by Lucian Freud – even though Freud himself denied it.

Of course, much globetrotting is involved in the show as the two of them try to prove the provenance of the paintings. ‘He’s always forgetting his phone,’ says Fiona. ‘He left it on the train once so we had to ring the train company and get to speak to whoever the guard was on that particular train to get him to drop it at another station and then...’

Philip interrupts. ‘You think one or two steps ahead,’ he says to her. ‘She’s so good at dealing with issues,’ he tells me. ‘What happens is that face that reads the news turns upon a miscreant and says, “Sort it!” I can relax because I know I’ve got this battering ram...’ Fiona shrieks. ‘That sounds horrendous!’

Philip, 56, has been married to his wife Catherine for 22 years too and they have a 20-year- old son Oliver. They divide their time between the Cotswolds (a few junctions on the M40 north of Fiona) and London. A leading authority on British portrait painting, Philip was an art adviser to the House of Commons and House of Lords before presenting Fake Or Fortune?. Earlier this year he and Fiona completed a fifth series of the show, which was borne from Philip’s book Sleuth, in which he writes about the art experts who risk fortunes and reputations to authenticate overlooked works of art. He and Fiona are both rightly proud that the last series attrac- ted 4.85 million viewers on BBC1, a hugely impressive figure for a show about art. ‘When we started we had to persuade august institutions like the National Gallery we were serious. They don’t generally like to get involved with TV programmes, particularly one called Fake Or Fortune? which sounded like a game show,’ says Fiona. ‘We were aghast when they called it that.

‘But the sniffiness we encountered has all but vanished now. For us it’s a badge of honour they want to deal with