The Fall

I complain when there aren’t enough good programmes to write about. I complain when there are too many good things and there isn’t room to cover them all. What does it take to make me happy?

Well, how about a week of television that’s decent enough, but not so marvellous that you can’t go out and enjoy a walk on a warm summer evening, if weather permits?

The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women (BBC Four, Sunday at 9pm) is a lovingly made retrospective on the life and work of Erwin Blumenfeld, who fought for Germany in the First World War. He was confined to a German concentration camp during the Second World War, but survived both those horrors.

Blumenfeld went on to become one of the world’s most innovative and, incidentally, most highly paid fashion photographers. He brought a fine art sensibility to the medium, operating as a sort of creative bridge between Man Ray and Irving Penn.

His family life was extraordinary by any measure, too: one of his numerous mistresses later married his son, and the manner of Blumenfeld’s death was both bizarre and mysterious. But he’s largely forgotten today, except by a small coterie of industry insiders who pop up to inject interesting anecdotes and opinions into what is essentially an animated coffee-table book.

Blumenfeld’s images are beautiful to gaze upon, and we get plenty of them to look at. I’m just not altogether sure if The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women is really a television programme – it feels more like a lavishly illustrated book that someone left in my house for an hour.

We’re in more conventional telly territory with The Fall (BBC Two, Monday at 9pm). It’s the second episode this week, but it won’t take you long to catch up. Starring X-Files star Gillian Anderson, whose brittle beauty increases with every passing year, it’s a serial-killer yarn set in Belfast. The background of grumbling sectarian violence and a fragile peace process gives a new angle to what might otherwise be a solidly serviceable Silent Witness script.

Or, one might say, Columbo. As with the stories of Peter Falk’s rumpled detective we know whodunnit from the outset. We spend as much time with the mouse as with the cat in this one. That dual narrative leads to some jarring sequences – such as one where a conventional love scene is intercut with the murderer’s actions in a most unsettling manner.

It’s very good. The Belfast setting and Anderson’s take on her character lift it slightly out of the ordinary, even if the core story is nothing we haven’t seen before. Specifically, I was put in mind of Prime Suspect more than once. No great surprise, once you discover that it’s written by Allan Cubitt who wrote the second series of that great, groundbreaking show. The Fall is, I suspect, liable to be similarly successful.