UR TV CAST

Determined to help Russian Jews emigrate to Israel, he hectored Soviet leaders about their Arab allegiances, and banged his fist on tables a lot. As if this wouldn’t make him enough enemies, he dabbled in pensions in his spare time.The programme was very hazy about Maxwell’s origins, but finally admitted that most of his relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. He got along so well with Russians that the KGB was thinking of recruiting him, but he was too high-profile That surely allowed him to dump MI6 too in the end. He became a multi-millionaire with contacts in all the right places and a media moguldom thrown in for fun.

He tried to buy half of Bulgaria at one stage, and was probably engaged in arms deals. He was playing games with the lot of us.His love affair with Russia seems to have begun when MI6 set him up as the head of Pergamon Press, a front for gathering intelligence on Soviet scientists. There were in fact a lot of photos of him trying to alleviate the global situation by wearing a particularly cheery red tie, with yellow stars and blue squiggles on it, during meetings with Gorbachev, Yitzhak Shamir and others. But the anti- abortionists, who’d exercised their right not to steal paintings, seemed to escape blame.From there to a still-life with men in suits, Dispatches’ exhaustive account of Robert Maxwell’s clandestine activities (Citizen Maxwell, C4) Well, I was exhausted, and I think Maxwell was too Perhaps he just got sick of all the suits. There were some sinister night scenes, risky meetings in lonely cafes, shots of the sedate urban landscape of Oslo (contrasted with helicopter views of Munch’s lakeside summer place where he went all expressionistic), lots of lifts and stairwells and several mentions of a guy named Sid. Then someone, possibly Sid himself, got kicked in the balls, the hideous painting was returned to its rightful place and four people ended up in prison, much to the relief of the gorgeous but naive Minister of Culture who said “it was hard to believe that such evil things could take place” – and who would rather have been at Lillehammer anyway, watching the Winter Olympics I couldn’t follow any of it. He set about getting cards printed to suggest he was from the Getty Museum, and booked into expensive hotels He flew to Oslo with pounds 500,000 as hand luggage.

But the rest was played out like some low-budget Simenon film, all subtitles, grey skies and (though very polite) shifty foreigners, against a background of dim 007-ish music. They’d decided this was a good moment to announce that foetuses are worth more than paintings Little white coffins were paraded about. But all that happened was that the anti-abortionists became the first suspects.An expert from New Scotland Yard was called in. Instead of the usual finger, a piece of picture frame was left in a quiet country lane.Militant anti-abortionists immediately jumped on the bandwagon, issuing faxes. Norway’s proud enough of Munch to value the painting at pounds 48m – the paint-nappers, more modestly, asked pounds 700,000 for it in ransom. Anyone could have done it at any time, but nobody could be bothered before.

It only required climbing a small ladder and breaking a window. In happier times, Charmian could probably have hidden him in her beehive hairdo. Now, plump and haggard, she sits in Melbourne, raking over the past. Cut to Biggs playing with his Brazilian- born son in the 1970s, wearing an assortment of terrible trousers. Arrest that man.
Theft of the Century (Omnibus, BBC1) was not about the theft of the century at all, but the abduction of one of the world’s most hideous paintings, The Scream, from its spot on a wall of the National Gallery in Oslo. He’s full of self-justification, but at least he doesn’t whine. Instead, he recommends Rio to any other British criminal who doesn’t like jail, never pausing to consider whether Brazil really wants all of England’s old robbers (perhaps his punishment should be to try and control this influx of louts) He’s old now, the glamour’s almost gone.