Television - A tale of French artists proves less a forgery than a try-on, writes Andrew Billen The Impressionists (BBC1)

North Oxford, England, 2020. A nervous journalist enters a sprawling but verdant garden where an old man in a yellow suit and sprawling beard is, for the millionth time, Paintboxing his Charlie Dimmock water feature on to his wireless laptop.

"Bonjour, Monsieur Thompson. Je suis avec Les Temps Online," he says, which is odd, because everyone else is speaking perfect English. "Ah, journalists, they all want to know me now," says the vener-able former director general. "It wasn't always like that. We saw the world afresh, in digital, in HD, but for a long time the world didn't seem to understand us. They thought we were in it for ourselves."

"Us?" asks the young blogcaster.

"Yes, you know, that crowd: Fincham, Keating - and Grade, the tricks I learned from him, the old master! We called ourselves the 'impressionists', because we liked to give the impression we represented value for money. We were of our time and yet beyond it."

"But how," the young man replied, "did you do it? How did you get the government to hand you the cash when everyone else had to fight for every penny?"

"Ah, for that," the wise man replied, pouring his visitor a cherry brandy, "you have to understand two things. We believed in water, in light, in colour, in public service television, but we also believed in ratings, market solutions and paying Jonathan Ross the going rate. And so it was we made dumbing down . . ."

"Respectable?" offers the young podcaster. "No," thunders Thompson, "into art!" The screen dissolves and we find ourselves, with growing incredulity, watching The Impressionists (Sundays, 6.35pm).

Giverny, France, 1920 (but much as above): a young man from Les Temps nervously approaches Julian Glover, who is playing Old Claude Monet. The old feller is having a severe attack of the flashbacks, causing us to travel back in time yet again to "Paris, France, 1862". Richard Armi-tage, as Young Monet, is having a squabble with his art master, Monsieur Gleyre. "Here is a nude woman. Do not look at her," says Gleyre. "Which artist painted her in this classical, unpornographic pose, Monsieur Monet?" Monet is stuck, but a fellow student helps him out by pretending to sneeze while actually articulating the name "Titian". "Thanks Renoir," says Monet and soon the two are the best of friends, drinking every night with their pal Bazille who, obviously, must be about to die young or we would have heard of him.

In another part of town, Manet is painting another nude. "Monsieur Manet," she says, "surely you are not going to paint me looking out of the canvas like a brazen strumpet?" "This is Paris in 1862. This is how we live now," he replies, which is helpful if you have missed the earlier caption. A fat woman enters: Manet's dear fat wife, Suzanne. "You've painted that woman's pussy," she complains. "So what?" he says. "Atissue painted goddesses with dogs." Everyone laughs.

At first Manet hates Monet because he thinks he has stolen his name, but Monet explains he has stolen not his name, just his technique, so that's all right. Anyhow, Monet is an odd name, and you can't help making jokes about it, as when Renoir says, "Life's more fun when you don't have to worry about money, Monet." (Like so much of the dialogue for this programme, this joke is "based on letters, records and interviews of the time", or so another caption tells us.)

The main thing about the impressionists, we discover, is that they liked painting outdoors. This was not as daft as it seemed, because it was always summer and it never rained, but it is not to say there weren't problems. One day the impressionists are in a wood painting masterpieces and absolutely nothing goes right. One of them trips over and nearly drops his easel, another's painting falls over on to the ground and then Monet gets hit in the leg by a discus and limps all the way home, although Renoir jokes he is only doing an "impression" of a man with a limp.

Then bad things happen and there are many more clouds in the sky. Monet gets his girl pregnant and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte declares war on Prussia. There is a siege of Paris and everyone has to eat ratburgers. Bazille, the one who dies early, dies early, killed by Prussians who spot him sketching a masterpiece. Madame Manet underlines how terrible the times are by saying: "These are terrible times." Fortunately, Monet is in England using his brilliance with colour to paint the Houses of Parliament in greys. "Jean," he tells his son, who cannot read superimposed captions, "this is England."

"As we travel, we return," muses Old Monet. "Where to?" asks the reporter for Les Temps. "To France, you idiot," Old Monet says, forgetting how kindly he is. "I mean, to light and water and clouds and sky."

". . . and digital on demand and bonuses and lots and lots and lots of redundancies," Old Thompson mutters to himself dreamily, for we are back in the year 2020. "But there is just one thing I don't understand," says the man from Les Temps Online, who is also the critic from Le Nouvel Homme Politique. "Back in your day, did the BBC ever bother to make a proper programme about impressionism?"

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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