ABOVE: detail from JMW Turner’s Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843), which was stolen in 1994 but later recovered. That recovery is under scrutiny in anticipation of a controversial BBC documentary about the incident.

The reason heist movies continue to succeed is because the appeal is based on timeless curiosity: the pure mechanics of thievery, unknown to most people but undeniably intriguing from a logistical standpoint. For people who can’t set their own VCRs, pulling off the planning required to pull of a theft is kind of fascinating. A BBC documentary scheduled to air soon apparently follows the trail long past where most heist thrillers fade to black, tracing the process by which a stolen artwork is recovered, and the tale they apparently have to tell is getting some noses out of joint.

The bluntly named documentary, Undercover Art Deal, will air on Wednesday, and it claims that Tate Britain paid about £3 million for somehow retrieving two Turner paintings stolen in 1994 from the Frankfurt Schirne Kunsthalle. That “somehow” is the qualifier on which hangs a tangle of controversy. After the theft, the museum’s insurers paid out the £24 million for which the two paintings were insured, and therefore essentially owned the paintings if they were ever recovered (the Tate would have first chance to buy them back, however). Skip forward four years with still no paintings, and the Tate buys back the rights to the Turners for £8 million. One painting is found in 2000, the second in 2002. The cost of finding them was apparently £3 million, paid to unknown parties through a German lawyer intermediary. So was it a ransom, or payments for tips from helpful samaritans? That’s the sticky wicket, and we’ll just have to watch BBC to learn more.

LINK: BBC > Row over BBC ‘art deal’ programme