TV Pick of the Week: The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies - review by Yvette Huddleston

Rebekah Staton stars as Alice who is living an apparently quiet, average life in Oxford with her children’s party magician partner Benjy (Julian Barratt), their young son and her elderly father Bill (Karl Johnson). She works as a personal assistant to pretentious yummy mummy fashion designer Juno Fish (Romola Garai) but she has her own quirky design ideas that she works on at home in her spare room.

Then one day she spots a man in Oxford who she recognises as her ex-husband Rob (Alistair Petrie) who went out to pick up a Chinese takeaway one evening several years earlier and never came back. He also took all her money with him and fleeced her parents’ entire retirement fund with a dodgy investment scam. He is clearly an accomplished conman and is now in Oxford claiming to be an academic, an environmental activist and ‘disruption exploration’ pioneer, giving lectures on his time in the North Pole and inviting people to invest in his ground-breaking academy. He has even somehow managed to persuade natural historian and national treasure Sir Ralph Unwin (Derek Jacobi) to sponsor him in this endeavour.

Alice, of course, knows that he is a fraud and sets about trying to expose him, especially when she realises Rob is lining up another victim – respected academic and bestselling novelist Cheryl Harker (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). Independently wealthy and living in a huge mansion just outside Oxford, Harker is recently widowed having cared for her husband as he succumbed to dementia. She is grief-stricken, lonely, and vulnerable to Rob’s Macchievellian manipulation. Rob is funny, energetic, charming and treats her as though she is the most special person in the world. Exactly the same tactics he used on Alice – and, it transpires, countless other women before and since. Desperate to prevent Rob from ruining the life of another woman, and to exact her own revenge, Alice befriends Cheryl and plots his downfall.

While much of this is delivered in black comedic style, it also has much to say about the venality of these charming scammers, how and why they manage to deceive people so successfully and what we now recognise as coercive control. Petrie is chilling as the arch manipulator, and Staton and Marianne Jean-Baptiste are both excellent as the victims who must fight for their lives to escape his web of deceit.