What to stream this week: con man Robert Chance in BBC First’s witty black comedy The Following Events are Based on a Pack of Lies
- Con man Robert Chance (played by Alistair Petrie) has returned after vanishing for 15 years, and an old victim (Rebekah Staton) is going after him
- Meanwhile, on Disney+, K-drama The Worst of Evil follows criminal gangs in mid-1990s Seoul, combining macho action scenes with an interesting plot
Dr Robert Chance is back from the never-dead-in-the-first-place, having popped out from the matrimonial home for a Chinese takeaway. Fifteen years ago.
Chance is not a doctor and might not even be a Robert, but he is a chancer: an audacious con man who has preyed on a string of vulnerable women and their families to create a fraudster’s well-upholstered lifestyle in The Following Events are Based on a Pack of Lies (BBC First). “Take a chance on me,” one can imagine Chance singing about himself – and they do.
In this wittily titled five-part series, Chance is adroitly played by Alistair Petrie, who makes him a chameleon, effortlessly flattering and solicitous one moment, brimming with menace the next.
But now it seems Chance has chanced his arm past the limit of his good fortune. After a literal chance sighting on an Oxford street, Alice (Rebekah Staton), estranged wife and member of the sisterhood of victims, courageously vows to expose Chance for what he is.
And that is not his new, duplicitous incarnation: a donations-garnering “award-winning eco-preneur”, according to his personal billing. “A property developer from Stoke” (an English industrial city) is Alice’s more accurate, damning appraisal – one running, she might have added, a fake climate academy in Greenland.
