Mystery and excitement in painting whodunnit - BBC's Fake or Fortune? is absorbing detective story

Forget a new Marple or Poirot or an outing for Death in Paradise. Hold your breath for BBC One’s Fake or Fortune? What Happened Next? Helen McNicoll.

Sounds duller than a rainy day spent indoors dusting your trinkets. Admittedly, talk of creamy pigment as experts tried to authenticate a painting by Canadian artist Helen McNicholl was boring despite shadowy lighting and presenter Fiona Bruce’s breathless anticipation.

For most of the hour-long investigation, it was edge-of-your-seat stuff as owner David Green waited to hear whether the painting he picked up at auction for £2,500 was a masterpiece that could sell for a sum to buy him a bungalow or a copy not worth the canvas it was painted on.

The cast of the mystery included the aforementioned Bruce and Green, art expert Philip Mould, art restorer, a conservationist, a biographer and billionaire buyer and McNichol collector Pierre Lassonde.

You could have called it The Novice, the Experts, the Hopeful and the Dream-maker. Bruce is us, the viewers; she knew as much about McNicholl as she could fit on the back of a stamp stuck to a postcard from the English city of Lincoln, where the story started.

That is where small-time art collector Green bought the Impressionist-style painting – which investigation revealed to be called The Bean Harvest.

The programme took us to Canada, where McNicholl was born and where Mould met scholar Julie Nash at the Grand Château Frontenac hotel in Quebec City.

It stopped by California to meet McNicholl biographer Professor Samantha Burton and there was an Agatha Christie-like mansion in Devon.

While Mould is following leads in Canada, Bruce is chasing clues about provenance, McNicholl’s career and the subject of the painting. Bizarrely, her investigations led to the Royal Horticultural Society Garden Wisley where head horticultural adviser Guy Barter reveals the painting depicts harvesting beans.

Fake or Fortune? takes in the hallowed halls of the Royal Academy and the Courtauld Institute.

It was an art lesson. I cannot tell a Monet from a Matisse, I now know McNicoll is one of Canada’s most celebrated artists. She was deaf and died young. She studied at Slade School of Fine Art in London and travelled with British artist Dorothea Sharp, painting in France and Europe.

To the denouement of the mystery of The Bean Harvest and the fate of its owner David Green.

The stakes are high. Is the painting genuine and if so what is it worth?

In a twist worthy of any whodunnit, collector Lassonde flies to England to see the painting and meet Green. He makes him an offer of a life-changing £300,000.

Will Green deal or no deal and take the painting to auction instead?

To tell you would be like revealing whodunnit if you have not seen The Mousetrap.

Episodes of Fake or Fortune: What Happened Next? are available on BBC iPlayer.