The con artists who struck comedy gold

TV review

The Artful Codgers, Channel 4

Flipping Out: Israel's Drug Generation, BBC4

SOMEONE get David Jason's number, I've got the perfect project for him. Or rather, the producers of The Artful Codgers have, because this entertaining documentary could easily be turned into a soft-centred British comedy film. Jason would play George Greenhalgh, who was 84 when he was finally busted after 17 years of convincing the country's art experts to buy a vast variety of antiquities that had been supposedly in his family for years.

His wife Olive (Anne Reid, perhaps) provided documents to give them credence. But middle-aged son Shaun, a loner who never moved away from his parents' Bolton home or had a job, actually made all of them in the garden shed, using tools from B&Q, having taught himself everything from library books. I'm thinking of Johnny Vegas to play him, or perhaps Peter Kay.

You really couldn't make it up, unless you had George's amazing ability to spin tall tales about Assyrian reliefs, Gaugin ceramics and Egyptian sculpture. "They were," said the commentary, "the most unlikely master criminals the world has ever seen."

Everyone involved (except, presumably, the Greenhalghs themselves) treated their scam as a bit of fun, even the dealers and experts who had been fooled. One of them even gamely re-enacted his face of wonder when George shuffled in with what seemed to be an ancient Roman silver plate.

They made at least £800,000 but didn't spend it, living in a crowded council house – when eventually arrested, Shaun was found to be sharing a tiny bedroom with his elderly aunt and mother and his brother (we'll cast them with people from Last Of The Summer Wine).

At this point in the film, Vegas or Kay will have to call on some acting skills to show us the pathos of poor Shaun, who – it was suggested here – resented the snobby southern art world for rejecting him and was manipulated by his crafty father. They'd only been busted when Shaun made something too heavy for George to carry, had to take it to London himself and proved not as good a liar.

While the elderly Greenhalghs are now home free, Shaun's stuck doing four-and-a-half years in prison. The only other victims seemed to be the unfortunate staff of Bolton Museum, where they spent ages raising cash to buy one of the fakes and were so proud of the jewel in their collection.

But the film understandably dwelt more on the comic than the criminal aspects of the operation. It even provided a title for the no doubt forthcoming film, as proposed by some of their Bolton neighbours who thought it was a great wheeze: Carry On Carving.

People's drug tales are rarely interesting, so another documentary about backpacking stoners in India sounded unappealing. But it was the context of Flipping Out that made it a little different, revealing that of the 50,000 young Israelis who complete their national service each year, 30,000 take their pay out and head to the subcontinent where 90 per cent take drugs – and some 2,000 have a mental breakdown. It's such an established pattern that the Israeli government funds drop-in centres in India to look after their people there, while an ex-Mossad agent is employed as a search-and-rescue man to bring the worst casualties home for treatment.

Yoav Shamir's film aimed to show that this is a direct consequence of the traumatic experiences many have had in the army. But having presented the issue, there wasn't enough context or insight to really say much more.