War and no peace! A billionaire bust-up that’s a true Tolstoy saga

WHeN you’ r e about to die, the poets say, all the events of your past life flicker before your eyes. But which past life? Is it the one you remember, or the one you actually lived?

The two can be drastically different: the proof was in The Countess And The Billionaire (BBC2), a fiveyear documentary covering a comprehensive, catastrophic breakdown of a marriage.

This split had everything you’d expect of a celebrity bust-up — assaults, screaming matches, court cases, custody battles and a showdown in front of a TV audience.

It also had assassination attempts, international money laundering and a feud with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

even for regulars of Hello! magazine, that’s out of the ordinary.

To hear Countess alexandra Tolstoy talk at the end of the ordeal, she was always unhappy during the years trapped in a jetset lifestyle with her oligarch husband sergei Pugachev, the man once notorious as ‘Putin’s banker’.

But when she first invited the cameras to peek inside her fabulous world in 2015, it was a different story.

she appeared blissfully content with her double mews house in Chelsea with its walk- in shoe wardrobe and its stellar neighbours — ‘Bryan Ferry lives over there’.

she and Pugachev divided their lives between an estate in Herefordshire, a villa near Nice and an island in the Caribbean. more than this (as Bryan Ferry used to croon), they adored each other.

When she first set eyes on sergei, alexandra declared, she knew she had found her soulmate. He went all gooey around her — we saw him leaning from a cottage window, blowing kisses to her.

Not the faintest glimmer of that affection survives, and neither will admit now that they were ever happy. Their past, or at least their recollection of it, has changed irrevocably.

Pugachev is now a prisoner in his mediterranean villa, sometimes refusing to step outside for weeks. If he returns to Britain he faces jail, and fears worse if he goes to Russia.

There’s the outstanding question of a billion- dollar bail- out for his bank that the kremlin’s accountants would like back.

But he managed to make a surprise appearance by satellite on a Russian chat show called Let Them Talk, hosted by moscow’s answer to Jeremy kyle, while his ex-wife was being interviewed.

He accused alexandra of only ever caring about his money.

The studio audience bayed for her blood. she looked as though she saw her life flashing before her, and screwed her eyes shut.

a gentler way of reliving the past is practised on The Repair Shop (BBC1), an idyllic hour of weekly relaxation — a sort of mindfulness on telly.

You might suppose you couldn’t get tearful at the sight of a toddler’s rusty old toy bus being restored.

But that’s before you learn that it belonged to a little boy in the sixties with cerebral palsy, who clutched it as he learned to walk.

By the time its green-andcream Glasgow Corporation livery had been repainted and the conductor’s bell was ringing, I had a lump in my throat like a football.

as ever, the delicate skill of the craftsmen and women was a marvel.

The screws and lenses in a pair of mini-binoculars had to be machined to within a quarter of a millimetre (100th of an inch).

Those glasses had once been used to hunt the monster in Loch Ness. a glimpse of Nessie really could make your life pass before you.