Viewing guide, by Joe Clay
Stealing Van Gogh
BBC Two, 9pm
On December 7, 2002, the art thief Octave “Okkie” Durham and his accomplice Henk Bieslijn scaled the roof of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam using a stolen ladder, smashed a window with a sledgehammer and made off into the night with two of Van Gogh’s priceless early works, View of the Sea at Scheveningen (1882) and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1882-84). It was one of the art world’s most audacious heists (one that figures on the FBI’s top ten art crimes list), although the paintings were the two smallest Van Goghs in the gallery. In late 2016 the paintings were finally discovered during a police raid on the home of Raffaele Imperiale, an alleged drug trafficker with ties to the Camorra in Naples. They were wrapped in cloth and hidden in a wall at the home of Imperiale’s mother. He is believed to have bought the paintings from Durham (who served time for the theft in 2003 after DNA from a baseball cap he left in the museum during the robbery helped to convict him) and Bieslijn in 2003 for about $380,000. In this tense and absorbing documentary that is part Crimewatch, part Fake or Fortune?, Andrew Graham-Dixon pieces together the story of the two paintings and looks at the wider world of art crime. The art historian, looking not unlike a Camorra don at times with dark glasses and a grey overcoat, flits between the dizzyingly wealthy world of the international art market and the clandestine world of Neapolitan crime, meeting the detectives, art crime experts, curators and restorers who tried to track the works down.
Further recommendations
Alastair Sooke investigates more audacious heists in The World’s Most Expensive Stolen Paintings (iPlayer, to January 28)
Miriam’s Big American Adventure
BBC One, 9pm
Miriam Margolyes is in rural Arkansas — prime cowboy country — on the final leg of her road trip through Middle America. The state is home to the so-called forgotten Americans, who turned to Donald Trump in the last presidential election. It is here that she feels the stark divide between city and country folk. “The people on the rough end, he’s given them hope,” she says. “He speaks to them in a way they can understand.” Margolyes has an unsavoury encounter with a member of an alt-right group in Harrison (dubbed “the most racist town in America”), but is buoyed in Texas, where she meets the state’s first African-American sheriff.
Girlfriends
ITV, 9pm
The problem with the plotline in Kay Mellor’s drama about the mysterious death of Linda’s husband on board the cruise ship was that it had nowhere to go other than into the realm of the unreal. And we are plunged deep into that world from the get-go in tonight’s episode, as the fantasist who claimed it was Linda (Phyllis Logan) who pushed Micky overboard turns out to be a deranged, knife-wielding psychopath straight from central casting. Sadly, this implausibility soon starts to seep into all aspects of the drama and the talented cast are powerless to prevent Girlfriends unravelling faster than a ball of wool in a cattery.
Kiri
Channel 4, 9pm
Jack Thorne’s drama is a tense mystery and an attempt to unpick racial identity in modern Britain. That it manages to do justice to these strands is testament to Thorne’s skill as a writer (assisted by Rachel De-lahay, who wrote every word of Miriam’s impassioned speech to the journalists in last week’s second episode). As the investigation into Kiri’s murder continues, the police are staging a re-enactment, because “the details of Kiri’s day are becoming more complicated”. The main complication is that the prime suspect, Kiri’s birth father and a violent drug dealer, is no longer in the frame. But if he didn’t do it, who did?
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Maestros of the Camps
Sky Arts, 9pm
For more than 30 years the pianist and composer Francesco Lotoro has been archiving and performing music composed in prison camps between 1933 and 1953, a period that covers the opening of the first Nazi concentration camps to the closing of the last Allied PoW camps. The director Alexandre Valenti follows Lotoro in a quest that takes him from the flea markets of Europe to the attics of the descendants of composers, uncovering music by Jews imprisoned by Nazis, soldiers of the Wehrmacht captured by the Allies, and US and British troops held by the Japanese, all of whom found consolation in music during their incarceration.
Catch-up TV, by Chris Bennion
England’s Forgotten Queen: The Life and Death of Lady Jane Grey
BBC iPlayer, to February 8
Over three episodes the historian Helen Castor is telling the story of our most overlooked monarch — Lady Jane Grey, the Queen who sat on the throne for a shorter length of time than the average Premier League manager’s tenure. What is the truth behind our “Nine-Day Queen”? Using first-hand documents, and with the help of a few of her historian chums, Castor explains how Jane became Edward VI’s chosen heir (despite his extreme reluctance: the first eight heirs to the throne were female and she was the most palatable) and why the Duke of Northumberland was so keen to see Jane on the throne.
Film choice, by Wendy Ide
The Madness of King George (PG, 1995)
Film4, 6.50pm
Nicholas Hytner directed this adaptation of Alan Bennett’s successful tragicomic stage play. The result is a highly entertaining costume drama about an embattled king who comes close to losing his crown and his marbles. What elevates the film is an astonishing performance from Nigel Hawthorne, who reprises the role of King George III that he played in the stage version of the story. The first-rate supporting cast includes Helen Mirren as Queen Charlotte, Rupert Everett as the Prince of Wales, and Ian Holm as the unconventional Dr Francis Willis, who attempts to treat the increasingly demented monarch. (110min)
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The Danish Girl (15, 2015)
ITV, 10.45pm
Eddie Redmayne makes another astounding transformation after his Oscar-winning turn as Stephen Hawking. This time he changes gender, beginning the film as the male Danish landscape artist Einar Wegener and ending it as a woman, Lili Elbe. The drama opens in Copenhagen in the 1920s, in the apartment of Einar and his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), two ambitious artists who seem wildly attracted to each other. There is no clue about the impending implosion until Gerda asks him to pose as her model in silk stockings and ballet shoes. Soon the female force is within him, unstoppable. (117 min) Kate Muir
What Richard Did (15, 2012)
Film4, 1.55am
Privileged Dublin teenager Richard Karlsen (Jack Reynor) is blessed. He’s a star rugby player, possessed of crystalline blue eyes and the kind of effortless charm that feels like distilled sunshine. He has everything going for him. Until one night, when he commits one thoughtless, violent act, and everything changes. This challenging, provocative drama is a shift in tone for the Irish director Lenny Abrahamson (Frank, Room). He moves away from the wry, darkly comic portraits of outsiders with which he made his name and crafts a taut film that is part morality tale and part psychological thriller. It’s acutely tense and morally complex. (88min)
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
Tez Talks
Radio 4, 11pm
Perhaps stand-up comedians are like novelists: they have to work that first autobiographical material out of themselves first, before they can tackle the really interesting stuff. Perhaps the urge goes. Certainly there are a drearily large number of superannuated egotists on Radio 4 who seem to want to talk largely about their own dreary lives and their cats. And now here is another comic to talk about himself, Tez Ilyas. However, for once you feel inclined to forgive him; partly because he is amusing and partly because he has a background that is a bit different from your usual stand-up. Ilyas grew up as a working-class boy in Blackburn. He was clearly bright, but his poor mother had a tough time at parents’ evenings and often came in to be told that her son was messing about. To which his loving mother replied: “Hit him.”
The Human Zoo
Radio 4 Extra, 6.30am
The zoologist Desmond Morris is a painter as well as a scientist, and this eye for the visual was, in part, what makes his writing so readable. Take this description, from The Naked Ape, of a man sitting in an open-topped red sports car. Such a man is, wrote Morris crushingly, “like a piece of highly stylised phallic sculpture”. In this interview, recorded in 1969, Morris talks about the great human achievement that is living together in a city (and not killing each other).