tv reviews
Loving Miss Hatto, BBC One/ Homeland, Series 2 Finale, Channel 4
Adam Sweeting

Joyce Hatto achieved a rare kind of immortality for being the pianist at the centre of an audacious classical music fraud, in which her husband faked "Joyce Hatto" CDs from the work of other artists and, for a time, enjoyed considerable success with them. The Hatto goose was cooked when the Gracenote music database used by iTunes detected that one of her albums was not her work at all.

A couple of  novels based on Hatto-like events have already appeared, but for this TV treatment, writer Victoria Wood stuck to the couple's real-life story, though she had clearly allowed herself plenty of creative width in the process. Joyce Hatto died in 2006, and while her husband William Barrington-Coupe (or Barrie as he was known) is still alive, he has never been terribly forthcoming with the actualité.

As presented here, Barrie was always a wide boy and a con man, though only in the nicest possible way. However nice that is. Wood's story was a classical game of two halves, the first part, set in the 1950s, telling the story of a talented but shy young musician who barely dared to dream of achieving any kind of success, and the classical musician's agent who vowed to make her an international star. All she had to do was play the piano, and he'd take care of all the rest.

Wood's deft writing was splendidly served by the cast. Rory Kinnear played the young Barrie with a perfect balance of cheeky charm, ambition and dodginess, while Maimie McCoy's fledgling Hatto was almost heartbreakingly naive, sincere and trusting (Kinnear and McCoy, pictured above). Her first meeting with Barrie, when he was bowled over by her as she was working as a rehearsal pianist for an orchestra, established her self-effacing character - "I'm just a rehearsal pianist, not needed on voyage," she muttered bashfully.

The fact that she was also unfeasibly glamorous wasn't lost on Barrie, though her obliviousness to such earthy concerns was drolly illustrated in their wedding night scene. While Barrie was eagerly waiting for her to slip into something more see-through ("let the dog see the rabbit," as he put it, to her bafflement), Joyce's attention wandered to the nearby piano, and she'd soon forgotten about her new husband altogether. "Oh lord!" she exclaimed, as he came back to find her. "Negligée... wedding night... I'm sorry!"

The 1950s milieu was evoked with painful authenticity, from the drab church halls where Joyce played to local music societies to the humdrum home life of the Hatto family, perhaps with Andy Stewart celebrating Hogmanay on the primitive TV (pictured left). Joyce's mother was played with shrewish impatience by Phoebe Nicholls, and her daughter was too eager to escape to heed her all-too-accurate warnings about Barrie's questionable credentials. But, try as Barrie might to launch his wife as a new classical sensation, eventually they had to face the fact that she somehow lacked the right stuff. 

Then Wood fast-forwarded us to Royston, Hertfordshire in 2002, where Joyce had morphed into Francesca Annis and Alfred Molina was playing the older Barrie. Decades of disillusion had taken their toll - "living with a disappointed person is hard, it drains the flipping life out of you," as Barrie put it - and Joyce had grown cranky and resentful. Since she was also suffering from cancer, it was difficult to blame her, though the drastic change from her sweet and ingenuous younger self was poignant to behold.

Under the circumstances, Barrie's scheme to invent a fictitious Hatto who had suddenly become a reclusive recording phenomenon in her late years, although unscrupulous and illegal, was quite inspired. Wood evidently also enjoyed the idea that this odd little couple could pull the wool over the eyes of august classical critics from the Gramophone and Radio 3, who hailed the brilliant artistry of the long-lost Hatto (the critic who hailed a Hatto performance but slagged off the same recording by its true performer was, perhaps mercifully, omitted). Eventually, it was largely through the efforts of Gramophone editor James Inverne that the fakery scam was exposed.

Barrington-Coupe has always maintained that his wife was innocent of the fraud, and here it was left ambiguous, with Hatto seeming slightly detached from reality and not really grasping what was going on. Whatever the reality, it made a strangely touching slice of drama.

Homeland reviewed overleaf

Michael Grade's History of the Pantomime Dame, BBC Four
Veronica Lee

There's nothing like a dame, as any panto fan knows. Michael Grade's enjoyable history of the pantomime Dame was shot through with affection as well as a deep knowledge of the subject, as befits a member of one of variety's most influential families and someone who fell in love with the artform at his first pantomime, in which his aunt Kathy was performing as principal boy, when he was just a young lad.

The Town, ITV1
Adam Sweeting

Plaudits to ITV for their recent campaign of new drama, even if the results have been patchy. The best ones have been well worth persevering with, and The Bletchley Circle and Tony Marchant's Leaving have wedged themselves most firmly in the mind.

The Christmas No 1 Story, BBC Two
Lisa-Marie Ferla

Of all the festive institutions, the Christmas No 1 holds a special place in my heart. I was one of those kids who, over the month of December, would carefully plot which CD single I’d be pledging my allegiance to (usually not the ultimate winner, apart from that one year Gary Jules’s cover of “Mad World”, from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, fluked it).

Imagine: A Beauty is Born, BBC One
Ismene Brown

They should use the whole Yeats line: "A terrible beauty is born". The programme, A Beauty is Born, being terrible, I mean, rather than the Beauty, which is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, his latest dance work, which isn't terrible at all, just a mite disappointing. And it strives a great deal higher and with more aim to stimulate than Alan Yentob did in this stock documentary from the BBC's flagship arts strand. Is Yentob the most uninterested specialist presenter on TV?

BBC Sports Personality of the Year, BBC One
Jasper Rees

Splendid summer, cataclysmic autumn. In the last six months, the BBC has tested to the limits the meaning of the phrase “good in parts”. The people at the top of the Corporation – and by March there’ll be a fourth rump in the DG’s hot seat within seven months – will have been looking forward to this seasonal beanfeast with more than usual avidity. There being no journalistic scoops to botch, no skeletons in the cupboard, no Panorama waiting in the wings – and for once no pictures to buy in from Sky - here was a chance for the BBC to cut a few shapes.

The Killing III, Series Finale, BBC Four
Adam Sweeting

I hope it isn't giving too much away for iPlayer catcher-uppers to say that in the end Sarah Lund never did get that undemanding desk job. Instead, the third outing for this ferociously gripping Danish series dragged us screaming and biting our nails right down to the wire, and managed to reach a conclusion simultaneously shocking and saddening yet, in a way, satisfying too.

The Hour, Series 2 Finale, BBC Two
Adam Sweeting

When the first series of The Hour aired last year, there was a lot of excitable talk about how it was the "British Mad Men". Having sat through series two, I've concluded that in fact it's the British version of Pan Am, that bizarrely idiotic airline series where all the air hostesses were covert operatives for the CIA, and visits to exotic international locations were achieved using plywood props and big photographs of famous landmarks.

Rome - A History of The Eternal City, BBC Four
Tom Birchenough

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian in a hurry - as well he might be when there’s a whole millennium to fit into an hour. A year ago we had his three-parter Jerusalem - The Making of a Holy City, now we’re well into Rome - A History of The Eternal City: no mean feat, given that these are major, impeccably researched and made projects. At least there’s no need for a costume change: Montefiore is back in his panama and chinos, outfit of choice for summer filming that lends him an almost Forsterian élan.

This World: Cuba With Simon Reeve, BBC Two
Lisa-Marie Ferla

The singer-songwriter Jesse Malin opens one of his songs with a monologue about a trip to Russia. Fresh out of a relationship, and invited by the gypsy punk troupe Gogol Bordello to open their tour of the country, he looked forward to seeing Red Square and spending time in a different world. He was disappointed, however, when the first things he saw there were a McDonald’s, a Starbucks and a Subway.