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Saturday February 20 2021 7-DAY TV & RADIO GUIDE page 23 Ode to Keats Simon Armitage reveals a new poem for the bicentenary It’s a fake! The Dutch forger, Goering’s dodgy Vermeer and a new movie art books theatre film music television what’s on puzzles the times | Saturday February 20 2021 1GR saturday review 3 streaming this week My culture fix 10 Film 11 What the critics are watching and listening to Contents The actor Sanjeev Will Hodgkinson talks Bhaskar lets us into his to the war hero and bank Cover story 4-5 cultural life, from Harry robber Nico Walker, who Rachel Campbell- Potter to Elvis Presley sold the film rights to Johnston on a new his book while serving film about Han van a jail sentence Meegeren, the man who fooled the art world Books 12-21 with his fake Vermeers Princes of the Renaissance, the science Music 6 of debating, facing the SEACIA PAVAO/NETFLIX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE The singer Sam Lee truth about Robert E Lee tells Will Hodgkinson and the Confederacy, and about working with the great generals of the English Heritage to First World War breathe new life into folk TV & radio 23-51 Ben Dowell 7 The hit crime drama “The dialogue feels as series Unforgotten if it has been written returns to ITV for a soft porn film”: Devils reviewed Puzzles 52-55 Crosswords, sudoku, Poetry 8-9 Scrabble and your The poet laureate Simon favourite brain teasers Armitage shares an ode to John Keats, 200 years Cover photograph after his hero’s death Alamy Rosamund Pike gives a fearsomely committed performance as a ruthless scammer in the thriller I Care a Lot Film Housewives, and a lot more films, joyous wedding scene — is as close from The Favourite to Broadcast as we can get to the splendour of this I Care a Lot News. Disney+, from Tues 19th-century ballet, especially now Rosamund Pike is back with a venge- James Jackson that the pandemic has scuppered ance as Marla Grayson, a ruthless English National Ballet’s planned scammer who preys on senior Theatre full-length production. The Royal citizens, in this scintillating Boston Ballet offers a recording from 2019 thriller. J Blakeson, who also wrote Julie that showcases Petipa’s scintillating the wonderfully devious script, Strindberg’s Miss Julie gets a brash, choreography, a feast of nonstop clas- directs a fabulously unpredictable coke-snorting reboot in Polly Sten- sical and folk dances. Wonderful movie that is noir to its bones while ham’s 2018 National Theatre version music by Glazunov too. The cast is led making all sorts of delicious adjust- of the classic play about class, sex and by Natalia Osipova in the title role, ments to the surface. For her crimes transgression, transplanted to a well- with Vadim Muntagirov as the knight against the elderly, you will want to heeled London party setting. Vanessa Jean de Brienne, but really the whole see Grayson punished. Yet Pike is Kirby, a memorably sharp-tongued ensemble shine. stream.roh.org.uk such a thrilling, invigorating screen Princess Margaret in The Crown, Debra Craine presence that it’s impossible not to plays a tycoon’s daughter who has her cheer for her. Amazon eye on her father’s Ghanaian chauf- Pop Kevin Maher feur, Jean. There’s loud music, sweaty dancing, racial politics and lashings Mogwai with Ian Rankin Television of 21st-century angst in Carrie Crack- Since 1995 Mogwai have been mak- nell’s production. Eric Kofi Abrefa ing mostly instrumental, deeply Pelé plays Jean, while Thalissa Teixeira atmospheric music that finds the Joining the recent roster of classy provides a hint of warmth as his sweet spot between gentle melody archive-led documentaries about fiancée. ntathome.com and horrible noise. The Scottish band global sporting greats is this adroitly Clive Davis would have made their new album As constructed tribute to the 80-year- the Love Continues in the US, but the old Brazilian, possibly the most Classical pandemic had them confined to accomplished footballer to lace boots, Worcestershire, with the American and certainly the only one to lift three Stephen Hough/John Eliot producer Dave Fridmann on Zoom World Cups. There is some of the Gardiner hovering over the recording like “an usual reflection on his tough early life The Bournemouth Symphony Orch- Orwellian oppressor”. They discuss and a sense of Pelé’s role in shaping estra’s series of streamed concerts the latest stage of their weird music his country’s national story. But spark into life again with a combusti- odyssey with the crime writer and mainly this is a chance to relive sunny ble combination. It is, remarkably, superfan Ian Rankin, in an event that days of stunning gold-shirted goals the first collaboration between the includes an LP or CD of the new and to hear from the man himself as pioneering conductor John Eliot album in the ticket price. well as those who knew or played Gardiner and the mercurial pianist roughtrade.com, Mon, 7pm alongside him. Netflix Stephen Hough. They have come Will Hodgkinson Ben Dowell together for Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, a work that began life (in Exhibition Big Sky Brahms’s notebook) as a symphony Disney+ has been making a big noise and has a vast dramatic span. This V&A: Explore the Collections about Star, the streaming service’s masterpiece is prefaced by a work by The V&A, a fabulous assemblage of new section that expands the overall Brahms’s one-time mentor, Robert objects that together unfurl the histo- catalogue a bit beyond family- Schumann — the overture to his ries of art, craft and design, has just friendly fare. Leading the new series opera Genoveva. bsolive.com, Wed, launched a digital platform on which is Big Sky from David E Kelley, the and on demand to Mar 26 well over a million objects can be creative dynamo behind Big Little Neil Fisher viewed. Make the most of this lock- Lies. This Montana-set crime thriller down to find out about anything is less nuanced and more mainstream Dance from illustrated manuscripts of than Big Little Lies, but it isn’t averse Ethiopian homilies to peculiar glass to a dark, rug-pulling twist or two. Raymonda jellyfish and the first fashion thong. Star also has archive hits from a dis- Rudolf Nureyev’s opulent staging of vam.ac.uk/collections tant TV era, such as 24 and Desperate the third act of Raymonda — the Rachel Campbell-Johnston 4 saturday review 1GR Saturday February 20 2021 | the times cover story Faking it: how one man duped the art world The con artist Han van Meegeren’s counterfeit Vermeers made it into Hermann Goering’s art collection. As his biopic is released, Rachel Campbell-Johnston looks at a life in forgery n May 9, 1945, just fake.fa The Last Vermeer, based on a after Germany had bbook by Jonathan Lopez (The Man signed its uncondi- WWho Made Vermeers) and directed tional surrender, bby Dan Friedkin, probes the hidden Reichsmarshall ccomplexities of people and markets Hermann Goering, aand perceptions as faith and integri- commander of the tyty, beauty, value and truth are set Luftwaffe, architect of the Gestapo, ra- aadrift in a world of perfidy, skuldug- Opacious plunderer of property confis- ggery and doubt. cated from Jews, set about packing. Robin Hood meets the Scarlet Loading his wife, household staff and a PPimpernel and the Count of Monte few of his most treasured possessions CCristo in the protagonist, Van Mee- into a motorcade, he headed for ggeren (played by Guy Pearce, the Austrian border, where he hoped aalthough you might take a moment for a meeting with General Eisenhow- tto recognise him under that bohe- er. He had lost everything. The Third mmian grey bouffant). His is a pica- Reich had unravelled. Berlin lay in rresque story. Born in 1889 in the rubble. His beloved country estate DDutch provinces, he was 22 when he of Carinhall was a ruin. And his colos- mmarried his pregnant girlfriend and, sal art collection, amassed over years of hhaving always preferred painting to kleptomaniacal acquisition and sstudy, began an artistic career as an dispatched to Bavarian salt mines for imimpoverished drawing instructor in safekeeping, had been discovered and DDelft. It was to be the only steady ransacked. eemployment he pursued in his life. Yet there was one object, prized above allll caught out Han van While the First World War was raging others, that Goering appears to have been Meegeren in court in across Europe, Van Meegeren took off to determined to keep. Before handing him- 1947 and, right, the the Hague, the elite playground of a neu- self over to American forces he entrusted forger in his studio tral Netherlands where, like a caged ferret a canvas, removed from its stretcher and set free, he slipped into the circles of the wrapped round a stovepipe, to a secretary. creative, the aristocratic, the well connect- A year earlier, costing him an exorbitant ed, the opulent. Cultivating expensive tast- 1.65 million guilders, it was counted as not es and bad habits — scandalous women, only the most precious item in his massive fine wines and wild revelries among them collection, but probably the most expen- — he ditched the long-suffering mother of sive artwork that anyone, anywhere had his child, taking up with Johanna de Boer paid for up to that point. What he was (played by Susannah Doyle), the pleasure- about to learn was that, in reality, it was loving wife of an art critic whom he event- worth nothing.