![]() Lang’s inclination here is to play the story for laughs. “I haven’t had hot food in three days and I’ve got chilblains.” “My mattress keeps deflating,” he whines like a child midway through the orienteering module of the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme. It’s John, calling from a phone box in the woods to complain. In one scene after his disappearance, she is at home struggling to keep the lie afloat with police and family when, calamitously, the phone rings. He tells the story from Anne’s perspective, which serves to make her more sympathetic than her man-baby spouse. Lang made his name on the peerless cold-case drama Unforgotten, and here his droll and disobliging reimagining of the Darwins’ survival of the dimmest ensures that the couple will remain unforgettable. Neither Canoe Man nor ex-Mrs Canoe Man were involved in this drama, which gives Lang freedom to imagine how the couple went through with their folly. “Where’s the last place anyone would think of looking?” John asks Anne rhetorically in the drama. Her sad eyes tell us that Anne thinks John’s plan is as cunning as one of Baldrick’s.Īfter returning furtively to the family home, John began a new life, holed up in a room that was hidden behind a wardrobe. Dolan’s best work here, though, is to appear both biddable and doubtful. His patchy north-east accent is no match for Dolan’s, however, which sounds like Sarah Millican’s with less helium. “It’ll all be over in a couple of weeks, I promise you.” Marsan is terrific in the role – a small-town Walter Mitty who is both wild eyed and deluded. “What could be simpler?” John (Eddie Marsan) asks Anne (Monica Dolan) in the drama. ![]() In the meantime, his wife reported him missing, lied to their two sons about her husband’s fate and claimed the life insurance with the – to my mind utterly fantastical – idea that ultimately the couple would resume their marriage, debt free. In 2002, the 51-year-old former teacher and prison officer paddled a canoe up the coast from his home in Seaton Carew, Co Durham, capsized the boat, faked his own death and hid out for a bit. The big question asked by Unforgotten creator Chris Lang’s dramatisation of real events, The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe (ITV), is why it took her so long. Until she could stand him no more, that is. Instead, like a more tragicomic Tammy Wynette, Anne stood by her man. ![]()
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