Fake Or Fortune
BBC1, Sundays, 9pm
There’s a point in the opening episode of the new run of art mystery series Fake Or Fortune – which aired at the weekend – when presenter Fiona Bruce tracks down an infamous forger of paintings, settles down for a no-nonsense chat with him in a London pub, and asks outright if he’s responsible for faking a William Nicholson still life bought for the tidy sum of £165,000 in 2006. He explains that, although he’s a totally reformed character and everything, he doesn’t like revealing exactly which fakes he concocted, as they are still out there in the wide world of art collecting, and naïve owners of supposedly valuable and great works would suddenly be massively let down. And that would be unfair, right? Um, OK mate, if you say so. More importantly for this spectacularly riveting first episode, he does at least reveal (spoiler alert) that he didn’t paint this particular Glass Jug With Plates And Pears. And good job, too, because at that point there’s still half an hour of the show left. If, for some reason, you’ve yet to wake up to the joy of Fake Or Fortune – in which Fiona and smooth art expert Philip Mould use any means at their disposal to ascertain whether a work of art is genuine or not – then this episode is the perfect entry point, containing as it does so many clues (including a train time scribbled on the back of the painting, straight out of an Agatha Christie mystery) and jaw-dropping twists and turns. Plus, Fiona and Phil get to say the word “provenance” in posh French accents even more frequently than usual. If you’re doing the FOF “provenance” drinking game, you’ll have got very merry indeed.