It’s not often, honestly, that I truly feel my time has been wasted. I have a really, really low bar for what constitutes an amiable or reasonable way of passing the hours. I do not habitually feel a tremendous urge to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds’ worth of distance run, admirable though I find the people who manage it. But filling 90 of them with a two-part documentary about the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree by a pair of local berks two years ago? Come. On.
The wildly inflated sense of the film’s own importance is demonstrated by the fact that its original title was The Slaying at Sycamore Gap. The slaying. The slaying. Just before broadcast it was renamed The Sycamore Gap Mystery, but it is the original that better suits the risibly sombre tone of the programme and the gathering bathos as the 90 minutes – 90 minutes! – progress.
