It’s no Top Gear, but this new car show has a nice line in knitwear: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV

Bangers: Mad For Cars

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Fake Or Fortune?

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Gyles Brandreth better look to his knitted laurels. Since first wearing a Scrabble design on-screen in the 1970s, the chatterbox star of morning telly has paraded an endless array of magnificent jumpers.

But he has competition, from the rapper and TV presenter Tinie. Launching his celebration of the motors his generation grew up with, in Bangers: Mad For Cars (Ch4), Tinie was flaunting his knitwear.

An outsized blue-and-red striped pullover made him look like a little boy who has raided his big brother’s wardrobe. But the yellow tank top, with dozens of dainty blue dragonflies dotting it, was a serious challenge to the Brandreth dominance.

Tinie is known for his fashion statements. Hosting the art show Extraordinary Portraits last year, he modelled a series of manbags, including a sporran worn around his neck and a bag under his arm like a pistol holster.

A trailer for next week’s episode shows him wearing a delicate green cobweb cardigan that looked like something Miss Marple might crochet as a teapot cosy.

Launching his celebration of the motors his generation grew up with, in Bangers: Mad For Cars (Ch4), rapper and TV presenter Tinie was flaunting his knitwear

Tinie is proving he can front all sorts of programmes, but perhaps his spiritual home will be with Patrick and Esme on The Great British Sewing Bee.

Bangers is a shameless copy of the Top Gear challenges. Tinie and co-presenter Naomi Schiff — an ex-racing driver best-known for presenting F1 on Sky Sports — each pick a car for a series of trials. This week it was a supermarket dash followed by the school run: Naomi chose the Volvo 850 while Tinie preferred a Ford Sierra… the boy racer’s favourite, a Cosworth RS500.

Neither of these vehicles was exactly representative of family cars. Volvo estates tended to be driven by the Labradors-and-wellies brigade, while Cosworths were supercars masquerading as saloons.

The real deal was a Renault Espace, the original ‘people mover’, a sort of shipping container on wheels. Tinie shuddered every time he looked at it.

But the Espace highlighted the big problem with Bangers: it’s one presenter short. Top Gear challenges worked because there were three, all bickering and boasting. It’s easy to imagine Jeremy Clarkson insisting on the Cosworth, Richard Hammond dwarfed at the wheel of the Volvo, and James ‘Captain Slow’ May trundling along in the Renault.

What’s less easy to imagine is Clarkson in a flimsy yellow sleeveless pullie decorated with delicate woollen insects. Thankfully, we’ve been spared that.

Cosworths can now fetch up to £150,000 at auction, putting them in the same league as some of the artworks investigated on Fake Or Fortune? (BBC1).

A canvas by the abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky was insured for 200 grand, though the artist had obliterated the painting with a coat of white emulsion, shortly before he killed himself in 1948.

Cosworths can now fetch up to £150,000 at auction, putting them in the same league as some of the artworks investigated on Fake Or Fortune? (BBC1)

A canvas by the abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky was insured for 200 grand, though the artist had obliterated the painting with a coat of white emulsion, shortly before he killed himself in 1948

Efforts by conservators to dissolve the whitewash hinted at a priceless work beneath — but Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould were staggered to be told that, if the layer of ordinary household paint was removed, the work might no longer be considered an original Gorky.

That sounds like a forger’s dream. Slap some Dulux over a picture from Ikea and announce you’ve got a lost Picasso.

This was a prime candidate for X-ray, always an entertaining part of a Fake Or Fortune probe, but the canvas was so big the team had to borrow a machine from a vet, who usually employed it on horses.

What the radiation beams uncovered was extraordinary — a third layer of paint, dating to much earlier in the artist’s career, and identified as one of his early missing masterpieces. In a reliably fascinating series, this was one of the most surprising yet.

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