Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
In the early hours of September 14 2019, the sound of smashing glass followed by a burglar alarm echoed across Blenheim Palace, a vast stately home in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Thieves had driven on to the estate in stolen vehicles, broken into the house and set about removing one of its more valuable fixtures. Famed for being the birthplace of Winston Churchill and home to the 12th Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace houses all manner of artefacts, from huge tapestries and rare antique timepieces to a lock of Churchill’s hair, cut when he was five years old. But the robbers had their eye on something else: a lavatory made from solid gold worth £4.8mn.
In the new BBC podcast Crime Next Door: The Golden Toilet Heist, journalist Clodagh Stenson tells the inside story of an audacious theft. The series opens at a high society party at Blenheim where the champagne is flowing and guests are forbidden from speaking; instead, they must jot down their conversations in black notebooks. This is the launch party for an exhibition of the work of Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, and, in typically mischievous fashion, Cattelan has forbidden small talk.
Among the works on show are a taxidermy horse suspended from a ceiling, a hyper-real image of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteor and the pièce de résistance: Cattelan’s 18-carat gold toilet, titled “America”. First exhibited in 2016, and fully plumbed in at Blenheim, it was seen as a satirical comment on the first Trump presidency. A month before the theft, Edward Spencer-Churchill, founder of the Blenheim Art Foundation, tempted fate by saying he wasn’t worried about security as a gold lavatory is “not going to be the easiest thing to nick”.
The Golden Toilet Heist is three episodes in and hasn’t yet flushed out (sorry) the culprits, but so far it’s a delight. This may be a true crime series, but there is none of the shock and gore that once characterised the genre. While staff at Blenheim were startled at hearing criminals in the building where they were sleeping — it took the thieves just five minutes to extract the toilet — there are no traumatised victims and no corpses, unless you count the dead Pope on the gallery floor.
Delivered in bite-sized episodes — around 20 minutes apiece — the series is determinedly jolly in tone: think The Italian Job meets Wondery’s British Scandal series. The producers certainly sound as if they’re having a ball as they throw in layer upon layer of sound: revving engines, cars smashing through gates, sledgehammers hitting metal and, yes, flushing lavatories — all overlaid with a genteel classical soundtrack. Thanks to this smart, if busy, production, the heist itself has the feel of a Hollywood thriller. But questions still abound, the most pressing one being: what do you do with a gold toilet once you’ve stolen it?
bbc.co.uk/programmes
Read the full article here