What nonsense it is, Robin Day used to say, this guff about getting tutored in television presentation skills. Have something to say, and then say it. In the unlikeliest place in television - Channel 4 - Day is being proved right. The plummy, cumbersome pensioner John Richardson is two-thirds through presenting probably the best arts series we shall see this year. Channel 4 is usually at the forefront of employing know-nothing presenters; its own Ali G does little else but parody the station's house style. In the case of the substantial modern art critic Matthew Collings, it has even been known to wrap authority in the mantle of ignorance. Picasso: magic, sex and death (Sundays, 8pm, Channel 4), however, leaves a great but untelegenic authority to tell the story his own way.
Richardson knows everything. He also knows everybody. A friend of Picasso's since 1953 - shortly after he and the art collector Douglas Cooper moved into a house two hours away from the artist's, where they created a private museum of cubism - Richardson can say that Pablo told him this or that without sounding like a celebrity stalker. Even if you did not know he was two volumes into a definitive Picasso biography (he jokingly calls it A Life of Picasso), you would be able to tell it was no bluff because of the number of the artist's descendants, including Francoise Gilot and her daughter, Paloma, whom he has persuaded on to the screen.
My favourite moment of the second programme was when Picasso's granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso interviewed her mother, Maya, on Richardson's behalf, about her mother's affair with the painter. No, they did not meet at the Galeries Lafayette. He saw Marie-Therese Walter through a shop window and liked her figure, her blond hair, her frosted-glass skin and her sky-blue eyes. But Richardson was there not simply to listen, but to disagree. The distinct possibility that she may have been just 15 must have played a part, too, he said when he returned to view. Soon, he was uncovering a portrait of this necessarily hidden child-lover sunk into a still life. With Picasso, a still life was always full of life, and never still. No prizes for guessing which priapic but dwarfish artist the jug with the big spout represented.
Episode one, "Magic", argued the case that Picasso saw himself as a magician or shaman, that his sculptures were gigantic fetishes and his paintings spells - or curses - cast upon his subjects. Richardson stacked up the case for sorcery: he was an Andalusian by upbringing, a product of the most primitive, superstitious area of Spain. Although he called himself an atheist, his widow had told Richardson that he was actually "more Catholic than the Pope". He enjoyed playing with gypsies and circus folk, and fooled around with tarot (which Richardson used to reinterpret that mysterious blue period painting, La Vie, as being about death). Richardson thought Picasso had never fully recovered from breaking a promise to God as a child that he would never paint again if his sick sister lived. He did, and she didn't.
The consequence, said Richardson, was that women would repeatedly have to be sacrificed on the altar of his art. This thought led naturally to the next instalment, "Sex". Presumably this was to be a ratings-grabber for the series. When Picasso died, the Sun's front page screamed "Sad end of sex maniac" (or something close). But Richardson insisted that, although highly sexual, Picasso's portraits of women were rarely erotic, and his account never salacious - and instead took us strictly back to the art. Picasso's mistress Dora Maar contended that when a new woman came into his life, the work changed. Richardson's argument coiled back to the conclusions of the previous week to demonstrate how Picasso's magic transformed the women.
It was not just that the little man turned women into gargantuan statues inspired by classical marbles. He made the yelling, screaming but unlachrymose Maar into the Weeping Woman, and transformed his first wife, Olga, into a terrifying harridan. If we believe the curator of the Picasso Museum in Paris, the five prostitutes in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon not only started out with curves (not cubes) for bodies, but were black: Picasso based the painting on a set of postcards of naked African women that he bought at a fair. A misogynist? Surprisingly unmisogynistic, thought Richardson. Given his background.
It is a cleverly structured series, working chronologically and thematically through the career. If, at times, the work feels as if it has been shoehorned in to fit the theme of an episode, Richardson can still come back next year and go through the whole life again, drawing different lessons. Instead of reducing Picasso's doves of peace to the pigeons that his father painted, or turning Guernica into a tourney between warring mistresses (Maar and Walter), we could, for example, have a programme about his politics. I don't suppose I shall ever read all of Richardson's biography, but I will come back for as many helpings as he cares to reheat for television. And congratulations to Channel 4 for commissioning a series that so manifestly required making, and to its director, the frequently overexcitable Waldemar Januszczak, for letting Richardson get on with making it at his own, gentlemanly pace.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
