BBC-HD Double Agent The Eddie Chapman Story x264 AC3 720p

Five minutes into Double Agent – the Eddie Chapman Story (BBC2) our bespectacled presenter Ben McIntyre has leapt from the cargo door of a Nazi plane, blown open a locked safe and done a runner in the London underground clutching a sackful of stolen banknotes. Someone ought, perhaps, to have told him that as a documentary-maker it is possible to have too much fun. It\'s all justified, just about, by the story of super-spy Eddie Chapman, who was, in McIntyre\'s words, \"a crook, a womaniser, a conman and a sort of hero\". His remarkable wartime journey took him from starvation in the cells of a London prison to enjoying the life of a Nazi war hero, stopping off along the way to make a sizeable fortune, and working all the time for British intelligence. It\'s a rip-roaring tale, expertly and enthusiastically told, as you\'d expect from the man who literally wrote the book on it, even if in places the choice of moments to re-enact does appear to have been motivated more by what looked like a laugh than any notion of historical interest. Chapman\'s fleeing from justice, for example, was given new life as a kind of Benny Hill sequence, while his training in sabotage cued clips of McIntyre squatting in a field as clumps of grass exploded around him, as if explosions were beyond the realm of the viewer\'s imagination. In several particularly questionable scenes we\'re told Chapman drank an alcoholic beverage, prompting McIntyre to neck a glass of it in illustration, so that by the time he began to tell us about the young spy\'s prolific womanising, you half expected them to cut to footage of the presenter getting jiggy with a wartime prostitute. Which, mercifully, he chickened out of, as he did recreating Chapman\'s interrogation at the hands of MI5, though he found his form again when the line, of dubious narrative merit, \"Chapman liked to drink at the Ritz\" cued a visit to a hotel in Oslo for a glass of red wine, and I\'ll leave you to discover what he does for Chapman\'s yachting trip out on a Norwegian fjord, but suffice to say it involves McIntyre, a yacht and a Norwegian fjord. Once or twice, the otherwise excellent script veered erratically into the realm of the naff, reminiscent of the Apprentice\'s daftest aphorists. On Chapman\'s code name, ZigZag, McIntyre solemnly intoned: \"The name carried a hint of anxiety, because a man who could zig could also zag.\" I\'ve watched his delivery of that line four times now, and I\'m fairly sure I can see in his eyes that even he knows it makes no sense. For all their fun, McIntyre\'s re-enactments were the potatoes around the meat of the show: a previously classified interview with Chapman himself, shot in 1993, oozing charisma and wide-boy authenticity, chock-full of gems such as: \"I undid my trousers and took this fucking bomb out,\" which, in context, makes perfect sense, but again I\'ll leave you to find out how. Served with a generous dose of archive footage, some very sweet interviewees and even a moving little love story, the result was an entertaining, informing and very silly documentary about a very silly, very British sort of hero. Much more serious was Imagine ... Alan Ayckbourn – Greetings From Scarborough (BBC1). For reasons never really made clear, this began with creepy fairground music and snippets of Ayckbourn dialogue played ominously over footage of the townsfolk of Scarborough, and, ratcheting up the tension, introduced the playwright to the instrumental of a song about a serial killer. This unsettling tone mercifully relented when the two Alans finally met. Yentob\'s interview was warm but probing, Ayckbourn responding with a wry candour to questions about the difficulties of his childhood, his early career and his long love affair with his Yorkshire home town. The sense that someone in the editing room had mistaken the programme for a horror film returned when the camera hovered, unexplained, for several seconds on a sign in an old cafe reading \"Try Banana Delight\", but, such odd moments aside, the show was rich with fascinating Ayckbourn trivia, teased out in interviews with friends, fans and contemporaries, from Michael Gambon and Penelope Keith to Catherine Tate and French film- maker Alain Resnais. There was also, of course, plenty of footage from his plays, and rehearsals for the latest, Neighbourhood Watch, his 75th. Which, in the light of the August riots, looks strangely prescient; a sign, perhaps, of the writer\'s enduring insight. Either that, or there\'s something very spooky about Ayckbourn. This programme seemed to think so, anyway. 59:09 AVC 1080i > x264 720p 10/10 AC3 stream copy 10/10 Enjoy, Pls help seed to keep torrent alive chrs

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