Imagine: David Hockney - a Bigger Picture

BBC One

David Hockney quoted Walter Sickert to his puzzled interviewer: “Never believe what an artist says, only what he does.” Fortunately, Bruno Wollheim must have known this instinctively. Instead of going for a long sit-down with Britain's greatest artist, he filmed him off and on for three years. What emerged, in last night's Imagine, was an account of the artist's lifelong but disputatious affair with the camera.

Hockney was, he told us, brought up in Yorkshire and California, the California available at the local cinema. His infatuation with it was consummated when he moved to Los Angeles. “I think,” he told us with candour, “all gay people like California because it is sunny and people wear less clothes.” His famous portraits of men, trunks and swimming pools, having possessed an almost photographic clarity, he would eventually experiment with replacing his paintbrush with a camera. Then, in 1999, he began a three-year mission to prove that from the 15th century Western artists had used primitive cameras as an aid to realism. According to one art critic, Hockney became a crashing bore on the subject of perspective.

Now, however, as we joined him back in Yorkshire, he was vowing never to peer through a camera again. It was all looking through holes; all Western perspective was, he fumed, gnawing on his cigarette. Back from the land of the lens, in Bridlington he led a life of unlikely bohemianism with his assistant and John, his chef and “companion” of 16 years. Out of his camera hole, he took his easels into the countryside, setting them up on unpromising roadsides, braving the elements, shrugging as they were toppled by the wind. A car pulled up one day. The driver wondered if he'd like to come round and paint his pub.

Hockney was too deaf to be put off but Wollheim noticed something. Hockney was painting roads, continuous roads, road movies even. And now, he was using photographs as a crib to predict what a huge multi-canvas work he was preparing for the Royal Academy would look like. Finally, Wollheim caught him inserting photographs back into his landscapes. Of course, Hockney had not ended his affair with the camera: hadn't he let Wollheim follow him with one for three years? This film may well be the best anyone will ever make about Hockney's process. It would have presented an even bigger picture if Wollheim had pushed him on his personal reasons for abandoning California for Yorkshire, the deaths of friends there (anyone special?) and why his paintings were now bereft of people.

Gregg Wallace's Recession Bites

BBC Two

Gregg Wallace's Recession Bites sent the 3-G MasterChef judge off to see if the nation's food-buying habits were being economically modified. After much barking at the camera, his conclusions were reassuring about everything except the edibility of Tesco's bargain lines (although its ketchup is apparently delish). Britain is looking for bargains but, while it has decided that organic food is a luxury too far, it has not abandoned its mission to buy more ethically. Hence the imminent arrival, at no extra cost to us, of the fair trade Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Adam Smith would have been ecstatic at Wallace's simplistic pay-off that real power lies not with the supermarkets but little old us.

CSI: Miami

Five

It took 18 minutes for the first of a new run of the hilarious CSI: Miami to come clean that Horatio Caine had not been shot dead at the end of the last series. The clues were not only in the title Resurrection and H's presence in the title sequence, but also in the fact that we saw the body bag being zipped up from the perspective of someone inside it. As Caine, David Caruso (below) no longer acts. He poses in beautifully assembled tableaux. A baddie involved in “the fused alloy bullet” scam escaped death. “Whatever it takes we'll find him,” said H. “It never ends, does it?” checked his protégé Eric. “And it never will,” he replied. We have been warned.

My four-star review on Monday of How to Find God won about one star from several readers who thought I was Christian-bashing, whereas, of course, some of my best friends are... Since I have no wish to turn into Richard Dawkins, I concede the possibility that Satan sent my tone slightly awry. Sadly, I am on no-star terms with Geoff Moore who made a previous, David Frost-fronted series on the Alpha course, Alpha: Will It Change Their Lives? I wrote that even ITV seemed a little ashamed of it and had tucked it away at midnight on Sundays. Moore says that the slot was previously agreed and suspects that I have no evidence that ITV was ashamed. Nor have I. I apologise to him - although not to Alpha, whose crash courses in an extreme version of Christianity that it does not initially spell out continue to alarm me.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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