Carry on carving

Last night's TV reviewed: The Artful Codgers; Magnetic North; Flipping Out: Israel's Drug Generation

There’s nothing quite like a story in which the posh and the pretentious get duped by the wily underdog. The Artful Codgers (Channel 4) delivered just such a true-life tale in splendid style, recounting the sometimes baffling, occasionally hilarious and generally bizarre circumstances in which a lowly Bolton family ran a 17-year crime spree, making and selling fake art works and antiquities to museums, galleries and private collectors around the world. The fact that two, George and Olive Greenhalgh, were in their eighties when they were caught last year only added to the piquancy. As did knowing that their ingenious self-taught son Shaun, 47, had single-handedly painted, sculpted and smelted the fakes in a tiny wooden shed in the garden of their council house.

By the time the law caught up with the Greenhalghs they had made about £1m from fake antiquities. The Queen went to Bolton to admire Shaun's 3,000-year-old figurine of Tutankhamun's sister, a shining young girl whose thin silk dress rippled over her body like water. Shaun made her in three weeks with tools bought from B&Q, and Christie's valued her at £500,000. Shaun's Romano-British boar hunt sold for £93,000 and was the pride of the British Museum. Shaun's Gauguin faun ("£18,000 to you, squire!") appeared on TV in a documentary by Waldemar Januszczak.

The high point of their success was the sale of the "Amarna Princess" to the Bolton Museum for more than £400,000. This was purportedly an Egyptian figurine– damaged, but still a graceful object. George span a Tess of the d'Urbervilles yarn about a well-off family fallen on hard times, and all this art having been inherited. George had an auction catalogue by way of provenance (Olive had bought that second-hand). He told the museum that a dealer had valued it at £500, but if they didn't want to pay that he would use it as a garden ornament. The psychology behind this approach was simple but effective, his apparent ignorance and indifference apparently working as guarantees of authenticity. Bolton passed the statue on to the British Museum for appraisal. The curator who did the appraising was interviewed here, explaining somewhat gracelessly that he had worked on the assumption the statue had a "cast-iron" provenance, and it wasn't his job to check. The statue was passed as genuine, the National Heritage Fund stumped up most of the cash, and everybody was delighted. Some cringe-making archive footage showed a Bolton curator crowing to news cameras over the acquisition of this "masterpiece".

There were red faces all round for the experts and auction house valuers who’d gone into ecstasies over these items, many of which got sold on by dealers for vastly more than the Greenhalghs ever saw. An example of this was the figure of a faun, supposedly by Gauguin, which they sold for £18,000 but for which a Chicago museum later paid around $125,000. To be fair, most of the connoisseurs were happy to put their hands up and grin shame-facedly at the camera. Art critic Januszczak even suggested that rather than blame the experts for being duped it is Shaun Greenhalgh’s ingenuity that should be celebrated. And the real culprits here, surely, are an education system that misses a talent such as his, and an economic system that doesn't find him gainful employment. The diversity of Shaun’s work – ranging from Roman silverware, paintings and sculptures by artists as dissimilar as Lowry, Thomas Moran and Barbara Hepworth – marks him out as one of the great craftsman forgers. Yet like much else in this entertaining but quite superficial account, questions regarding motive went unanswered.

The film dovetailed police interviews, amused or bemused experts and dramatised excerpts of Shaun in his shed and George in his perky little pork-pie hat. George was a con man. He had demanded and received medals for every engagement in the second world war, a period he had, in fact, passed peacefully in prison as a deserter. But Shaun, whose big, bewildered face haunts you, was the genuine article, a brilliant, self-taught artist. He had left school at 16, never had a job, never had a lesson in art. "Bit boring, aren't I?" he said to the police. He seems to have educated himself by mining that long-neglected mother lode, libraries. Among the brawn-coloured marble pillars of the John Rylands Library, in specialist books rarely lifted from inaccessible shelves, he read about lost masterpieces such as the Gauguin's ceramic faun, which vanished in the 20s. Only one sketchy sketch remained and Shaun recreated it from that ("Just show it me. I'll do it").

Twice in 20 years the Art Squad were alerted to the Greenhalghs' activities. When I say alert ... admittedly, they were undermanned, and it's a long way to Bolton. If anything, the whole affair showed that the art world isn't quite as cosy as you might think. If people had been talking to one another, the Greenhalghes could never have carried on. But while Shaun was doing the hard work and George was doing the hard sell, it all went as sweetly as a wedding bell. Shaun's versatility was astonishing. He could work in metal, ceramics, pastels, oils and stone, and George had a plausible personal explanation for every piece. "When Colonel Hardcastle died his housekeeper gave them to me mother," or "I'm related to a famous Irish poet and he gave it me grandma." When Shaun carved massive Assyrian panels, George could not carry them so Shaun took them to London himself. He left a Sennacherib battle scene with the British Museum, who found him strangely withdrawn ("I have no friends. I never go out. I find people difficult to deal with"), and two others with Bonhams. But Bonhams consulted an Assyrian expert, a very jolly, slightly pompous Richard Falkiner, who came down like a wolf on the fold. "I pride myself - I hope with justification - on knowing a bit about these Assyrian reliefs. My immediate reaction was 'Don't make me laugh!' I went on to my magic lantern, I believe they are called computers, and I got maps up of the area, and I thought, 'People like that, living there, don't have Assyrian reliefs, do they?'"

People like that ... living there ... When the Art Squad (an entertaining concept in itself) finally arrived in Bolton, they found a council house crammed with people and proof. Two of Tutankhamun's sisters shared a cupboard with old shoes. Shaun, who was 47, shared a tiny bedroom with his brother, his mother and his aunt in conditions described as “appalling”. George, of course, had the master bedroom. When the police asked George why none of the money had been spent, he said, "In that drawer I've six pairs of socks I've never worn." They were living in a poverty-stricken time warp. Doctor Who would have been taken aback. Nobby, a neighbour, said, "They were like ghosts. You saw them here, and saw them there, and then they'd disappear back into their own world." It felt cold, as though a cloud had covered the great joke.

In recordings of police interviews, the family seethed with resentment – Sean at an art world he had barely encountered, Olive at dealers who were, she said, making a tidy profit on their handiwork (a nice piece of criminal logic). At their trial this year, George turned up in a wheelchair ("He were never in a wheelchair before the court case," said a neighbour). He was spared prison on the grounds of age and infirmity, him being an old soldier with two enemy bullets in his brain. Shaun took the blame and got both barrels. Four and a half years. "There'll be something done about it, don't you worry," said George, speeding away in his wheelchair, and, for once, it was the truth. The Old Codgers, directed by a Nick Hornby, is the something that was done. As the credits rolled, it was possible only to conclude that the Greenhalghs did it because they could. And, having seen a mere 10 or so accounted for here, to wonder where the remainder of the estimated 120 great fakes they’ve made have got to. Shaun's neighbours speculated on those many undiscovered Greenhalgh masterpieces and raised their pints to the Bolton Wonder: "Carry on carving!"

You won’t see trailers for Magnetic North (BBC Two). But the BBC should be proud of this beautifully directed, intelligent series about the concept and landscape of “the North”, presented by Jonathan Meades. Meades, formerly a writer and restaurant critic for The Times, is brainy, scabrous, mischievous and impossible to pigeonhole: a fizzing anomaly in today’s landscape of banality-spouting idenitkit presenters.

He started his journey in the bare beachside town of Kuhlungshorn on the German Baltic coast. You knew Magnetic North was going to be special because Luke Cardiff (credited with “photography”) and the director Francis Hanly immediately evoked the open skies and barren beaches that Meades would later lyrically describe. The presenter was introduced, not chirruping away aiming at the lowest common denominator, but in suede shoes and rumpled blue suit and shades, immediately defining – in toff scattergun – the idea of North against the idealised South, which was characterised by “dreams of speedboats, exuberant vines, guiltless hedonism”. The spirit of the North, in contrast, was contrary, misanthropic: “To be northern is to be forever ill at ease with oneself”. In the French department of Nord, Meades mouthed heartily the words of Pierre Bachelet’s Les Corons: “The north was back to backs/The earth was made of coal.” Coal was smeared all over his face as he stalked in front of slag-heaps.

Meades somehow made his essay as elegant on television (an inelegant medium, especially around big ideas) as it would have been in print. In Flanders he looked at Gothic architecture and tossed out wonderful musings on herring: the predominant foodstuff for thousands of miles around, he noted that road builders in Flanders said the first layer of top soil held the bones of First World War servicemen, the second herringbones. Meades is as engaged with art as he is food, so went from pickled, soused and fermented herring to the meanings of northern art, revealing the likes of Bosch revelled in the surreal, dark, artificial and gloomy – under Bosch’s brush, “Heaven was a doggers’ paradise”.

Meades identified that northern churches were the first to strip out the amulets and excesses of organised religion and in their place a Gothic template was installed – all gargoyles and outer carvings. The paintings that first capture these stripped-down churches show buildings whose first function – as realised on the canvas with images of people talking or laughing – was not necessarily worship. The naughty North, you see. Meades was a wonderful guide: dragged up (but somehow not too stupidly) as a monk, he showed us the history of brewing. He asked one off-licence worker which favourite beer he would drink before he died. With Hogarth’s Gin Lane as a backdrop, Britain’s love affair with intoxification was sketched.

He makes no capitulation to television: he thinks and speaks densely. If you lose him just remain pleasurably bamboozled. It’s fun to see him on the balcony of his ivory tower holding forth, because a moment later he’s in the red light district of Hamburg, neon light flashing across his omni-worn sunglasses, advancing the case of a city that brazenly celebrates the sex trade. For those few who favour rain and gusty winds over summer warmth, mountains over beaches, and deathly wide and bracing open spaces (in Norfolk, northern England, or northern Scotland) with their biting winds and open vistas, this was an absorbing, wonderful half hour. Sparkling, thought-provoking, constantly challenging the accepted view, Meades seemed at times inspired, at others deranged. The only thing he never was, thank heaven, was obvious.

Flipping Out: Israel's Drug Generation was a drifting, melancholy film about a whole world I'd never heard of: the Israeli diaspora in India. Every year, hordes of young Israelis, discharged after their three years' compulsory military service, take their demob money and head for the subcontinent to get out of their heads. Quite a few have mental breakdowns, brought on by loneliness, bad trips and, the director, Yoav Shamir, wanted us to think, guilt over their experiences in the occupied territories (he found one ex-soldier prepared to endorse that view, another who seemed puzzled). Shamir followed Hilik Magnus, a former secret-service agent, who has spent his life searching for and retrieving the damaged. The most arresting episode happened in sound only, out of reach of the cameras, as Magnus tried to persuade one young man, apparently convinced he was some kind of messiah, to accompany him home. "Look," the messiah told him, "with all due respect, I'm the most important person for humanity just now." But isn't that what most of us think when we're young?