Risk management spider-style

Last night's TV reviewed: The Human Spider; Identity Fraud: Outnumbered

There was one extraordinary shot in The Human Spider (C4) that captured the sheer madness of what “urban free climber” Alain Robert does for a living. It came halfway through the film, when we already knew the diminutive (not to mention epileptic) Frenchman liked clambering up the outside of the world’s tallest buildings without ropes, harness or any other safety equipment. Or permission, for that matter.

We knew he’d scaled the colossal Taipei 101 (1,670 ft) and the Petronas Twin Towers (1,482 ft), among others. We’d seen him scoot not only up but all the way back down the comparatively puny National Bank (574 ft) in Abu Dhabi. Indeed, we’d seen so much footage of him climbing it was beginning to get repetitive.Then, as we watched him shin up Shanghai’s soaring 1,380ft Jin Mao Tower, the camera did something it hadn’t done before. From a vantage point nearby it started at the base of the Jin Mao and tracked dizzyingly up and up the vertical quarter mile of glass and steel to where Robert, a mere speck by now, was clinging to the side of the building just below the top, trying to avoid being grabbed by policemen on a balcony above him. The vertiginous sense of height and stomach-lurching vulnerability were overwhelming.

“I think he must enjoy life,” said one awestruck woman on the street below. But he didn’t show much sign of it. Robert’s response to surmounting such challenges rarely went beyond briefly raising his arms in the air, fists clenched. No triumphant chest-thumping, macho bragging or drunken carousing. In fact, with no manager or entourage to accompany him, he cut a curiously lonely figure as he travelled the world to do his stunts, sometimes sponsored, sometimes for the heck of it, and often getting slung in jail straight afterwards.

Whenever he spoke of climbing it was in terms of compulsion and a refusal to be “safe” or “ordinary”. Much of the time he looked haunted.

As did his wife and young sons back in rural France, whenever their masks of Gallic insouciance slipped. The fleeting glimpses of Robert’s home life were among the most revealing. Such as the high ceiling in his bedroom, kitted out as a climbing wall (clambering upside down above the marital bed he brought new spookiness to the spider image); and a hilarious spat in which he argued that while his work involved “managed risks”, his wife Nicole was blindly “building a tomb” for herself by refusing to give up smoking.

It was a moment of unselfconscious absurdity but further proof of how death casts a constant shadow over the Robert family even in this cosy domestic setting. And it added a much-needed note of poignancy to a film that, though fascinating, well-made and insightful, left its subject hardly less of an enigma than he was at the outset.

Fear of a more insidious sort ran through Identity Fraud: Outnumbered (BBC1) which hammered home the notion that ID theft is the world’s fastest-growing crime and that we should trust no one. Not even family and friends. The problem with identity fraud, well, the big problem, obviously, is other people using your name to spend vast amounts of money, leaving you to explain to your nearest and dearest that you have never subscribed to any of those internet porn sites, and, no, that doesn't imply that there are other internet porn sites you have subscribed to. But the other problem, speaking now from a televisual standpoint, is that there isn't a lot to see. People rifling through dustbins, or licking illegally obtained stamps to send out letters informing unsuspecting punters that they've won the Nigerian state lottery: this is not the stuff of Baftas, or even decent ratings.

So you can't blame the makers of Identity Fraud: Outnumbered, a sequel to 2006's ID Fraud: They Stole My Life, for trying to spice things up, with dramatic music ticking away underneath, and lots of rapid cutting in an attempt to add some pace to what was, essentially, footage of middle-aged policemen driving at very moderate speeds along quiet suburban roads. And to do them credit, they put up a pretty convincing case for keeping your mother's maiden name off Facebook and shredding pretty much any paper that passes through your house, up to and including missives from local restaurants offering you authentic Indian cuisine and free delivery on orders over £15. But one of the main lessons of this programme was that, in the end, you can't protect yourself completely. One woman here was stung for £8,000 when the people who had moved into her old house filched personal details from a letter that should have been forwarded to her new address; and a man whose passport had been stolen several years earlier suddenly found himself slung into a Slovenian jail, because crimes had been committed in his name in Germany.

What made this gripping, though, was the hint of family drama underlying several of the cases, sadly unexcavated. There was Simon Bunce, whose credit-card details were used to download child pornography from a site in the US. When Simon mentioned to his father that he was under suspicion, his father cut him off and told the rest of his family, who also cut him off. Fortunately, Mr Bunce was able to prove that the details were being used from an address in Jakarta, on a day when he was in south-west London. The voice-over announced that he is now reunited with his family, as though that solved everything. I wondered what was going on in that family that they were so ready to assume Simon was guilty. Then there was the case of Linda Cowan, whose sister Elaine used her name to buy a new house, even showing off photos to Linda, and landed her with £250,000 of debt. Linda was filmed prowling outside the house – "She doesn't deserve a house like this. She's not worked hard enough to achieve something like this. She doesn't fit in here... She wears leggings" – and then grinning broadly outside the court as she learnt that Elaine had been sent down for 15 months. Hard to know where one's sympathies lie on this one. Are leggings really such a crime?

Further reading: Climber Alain Robert is the human spider