REVIEW OF FRAMED

The BBC, currently under largely undeserved criticism for ignoring the arts, used the Bank Holiday to get in touch with its inner outreach worker. I, on the other hand, used it to get in touch with my inner plagiarist. In the one-off comedy-drama Framed, based on the bestselling book by Frank Cottrell Boyce, “I understand you've got in touch with your inner outreach worker,” was a line flung at Trevor Eve's desiccated National Gallery curator after he had gone native in Snowdonia. It was the best joke in the drama and, as such, he should have suppressed it lest it be used against him, by people such as me. Cynicism can do terrible damage to a wholesome moral. The conclusion of Framed was that art was good for ordinary Welsh people and bad for curators if it stopped them listening to their hearts. (Had it been instead that the village of Manod needed jobs rather than The Arnolfini Marriage hanging in its caff and that an art expert's job was scholarship not populism, the BBC Charter would, presumably, be revoked quicker than you could say James Murdoch.) For all that, Framed was a cleverly worked out piece of middlebrow infotainment. I had not realised that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were still so big in Wales, but the confusion between the amphibians and their namesake Old Masters proved a neat plot point about the degree to which traditional and pop culture are on non-speaking terms. The story was inspired by the relocation of the National Gallery's collection to a Welsh slate mine during the Second World War. Here, the paintings made the trip again after the gallery sprang a leak. The locals soon work this out, much to the dismay of the curator Quentin Lester, a misanthropist whose only jollies, judging by the sloppy grin he gives the Rokeby Venus, are obtained from fine art. Quentin needs to be healed, not by Art but by Woman. The attractive schoolteacher Angharad, played by Eve Myles (the age gap between Trevor Eve and her is the traditional 27 years), duly, yet inexplicably, throws herself at him, something he grasps only after she pokes him in the chest and tells him: "You wouldn't recognise a thing of beauty if it was standing in front of you poking you in the chest." Deftly wooing him by telling him what a rubbish critic he is, Angharad ends up his lover. In a final tableau, they stand together before van Eyck's portrait of the Arnolfinis, her stomach distended in sympathy with Mrs A's (although, as Quentin would know, the Flemish wife is not actually with child). The community is healed by the transformative power of art: the garage owner returns to his family; the wannabe art student gets a bursary, inspired by Monet; the butcher reopens the boating lake closed after his son drowned. Sweet. It should have been on an hour earlier than 8.30pm, though.