The Great Art Fraud; What are UFOs?; The Terminal List: Dark Wolf

““We lived quite a hedonistic life I guess. Did a lot of parties, afterparties, after-after-afterparties. Were there drugs? Yeah … I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun.” When it comes to encapsulating the hubristic excesses of the American art dealer Inigo Philbrick, the words of his partner, an impossibly posh-sounding one-time Made in Chelsea Sloane called Victoria Baker-Harber, barely touch the sides. Much like the £9,000 bottles of Château Margaux her beau glugged in pursuit of the good graces of billionaires who could make him nearly as rich. The Great Art Fraud (BBC2) takes you into an unreal world with a momentum as swift-paced as a lifestyle where something called a NetJets card — blithely described by our man as “kind of like a bus pass for private planes” — was obligatory.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“Every now and then, factual television will throw up a story that takes your breath away, drops your jaw and, while it’s at it, grinds all your gears. The Great Art Fraud (BBC Two) is such a programme. It details the riveting morality tale of Inigo Philbrick, a class-A grifter who infiltrated, and then ripped off, the contemporary art market until eventually the FBI extradited him, mid-lockdown, from his foxhole in the South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu.”
Jasper Rees, Telegraph

“Ghostbusters are not much use in this situation. If there’s something extraterrestrial in your neighbourhood, who ya gonna call? A dalek, obviously. That’s what Harvard astrophysicists have done, in the hunt for lifeforms visiting Earth from distant planets. Their dalek is a dome equipped with eight infrared cameras to scour the night sky — and a death raygun to exterminate anything it discovers, I assume. Pretty pointless to have a dalek without its neutraliser gun, after all. This psychotic telescope was the closest we came to seeing any space invaders in the one-off documentary What Are UFOs? — a plodding and humourless attempt to debunk every sighting of interplanetary craft and their occupants since the first wave of flying saucer photos, nearly 80 years ago.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is a prequel to The Terminal List’s opening series, which saw a conspiracy uncovering Chris Pratt, a Navy SEAL hero suffering from suspected PTSD, carve out his spot as an everyman action hero by targeting the scheming government higher-ups who had put his buddies in danger. There is a target audience for tub thumping shoot-out action romps like this, and I’m pretty sure I’m not it. At least that’s what I thought. But dig behind a script littered with buddy-bonding platitudes – “our job is protecting our boys” – and there’s just a hint of subversion sneaking through between the interminable hail of bullets.”
Keith Watson, Telegraph