TV Review: Canoe Man

So let's just press on

So, I was going to kick off with a palindrome. Something Panama-y, in honour of Canoe Man (9pm, BBC4). But here I am, only a few minutes off my deadline, and all I've managed so far is A Man, A Plan, A Faked Death, An Insurance Scam, A Hidey-Hole In A Cupboard, Panama. And clearly that won't do

So let's just press on

Canoe Man dramatised the story that tickled the nation in 2007, when we heard about John Darwin, who did a Reggie Perrin and staged his own disappearance at sea

It was a tale straight out of a comic novel and almost tailor made for the screen. Yet Norman Hull's one-off film never quite took off, despite appealing performances by Bernard Hill and Saskia Reeves

Why? Well, Hull's screenplay walked dutifully in the footprints of this stranger-than-fiction story and in the running time of an hour there was little time for anything other than a run-through of the events

It felt episodic, linear to the point of being flat

The film opened with Reeves on the beach, almost unrecognisable as the jittery, mousy Anne Darwin

"What idiot invented money?" she wondered in a voiceover and with that we were straight into a caper you'd have never believed, if you didn't know it was true

John Darwin went missing, lived in a tent for a few weeks, then sneaked home, where he bashed a hole into the bedsit next door, covered it with a wardrobe and spent much of the rest of the hour nipping in and out like he'd found some kind of drab suburb of Narnia

Then the two slunk off to Panama, where that whole A Man, A Plan thing came a cropper

While we're on the subject: disappointing, isn't it, that the word palindrome doesn't work backwards?

Hull had decided early on that this wasn't going to be a jolly sort of film. Wry, perhaps, but not an Ealing comedy. A drama, primarily

That, perhaps, led to the most unsatisfying part of all. The dark side of the Darwin story was the shameful deceit played upon their sons

But here, the sons were barely sketched: A couple of badly drawn boys who didn't even get to express incredulity at their parents' stunt

*It's an increasingly precarious business, this journalism lark. I've been thinking of jacking it in for something more stable, like a job as a TV blurrer

There's plenty of work going. This week alone there's been a pixellated choccie bar on Fussy Eaters, a pixellated boob on a breast cancer story on the news and a pixellated poo on Pineapple Dance Studios

I think the poo was blurred out to avoid causing offence to viewers. Don’t wait until it’s too late, find out more about fussy eaters .

If that's the yardstick, there has to be a decent living to be had from pixellating Gillian McKeith's face