Fifty years of scandal.
Few families have dragged their own reputation through the mud quite like the family of media tycoon Robert Maxwell.
Daniel Vernon's three part BBC2 docuseries 'House of Maxwell' traces the rise and fall of Robert Maxwell to the rise and recent fall of his daughter Ghislaine.
Narrated by Shaun Dooley, it should be a gripping and illuminating watch.
However the way it sets about telling what should be a compelling story is deeply frustrating.
Episode one jumps between the mysterious death of Robert Maxwell on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine off Spain's Canary Islands and the story of his meteoric rise and fall as a newspaper publisher.
The next episode deals with the mess his death left behind for employees of the Daily Mirror, for his sons Ian and Kevin and the rise of their sister Ghislaine as a New York socialite.
The final episode tackles the exposure of Ghislaine and the financier Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring and grooming of underage girls.
However it is the opening episode that most frustrates as it glosses over some intriguing titbits from her father's life and overcooks others.
Maxwell was a former Labour MP and Czechoslovakian born war hero from an Orthodox Jewish background in the Carpathian Mountains - now located in the Ukraine.
He initially fled to France during the Nazi occupation while the rest of his family were wiped out in Auschwitz.
He joined the Czech Army in exile and made it to England, serving as sergeant in the British Army.
Maxwell was decorated with a Military Cross after leading a machine gun attack on a Nazi outpost on the Dutch German border and was personally awarded the medal by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
Twenty four hours before receiving his medal, he learned his mother and sister had died in Auschwitz.
Not that you would know any of this from Vernon's documentary - all you are told is he was a war hero.
What you do get is an interesting glimpse of him breaking down during a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, as he sees the name of his home village on the wall.
Robert Maxwell spent six years as a Labour MP, representing Buckingham between 1964 and 1970.
This gets a brief mention but we are not told that he lost his seat to the Conservative landowner Bill Benyon and failed to win it back in 1974.
By this stage, he was focusing on business interests and specifically on building a publishing empire.
Initially he built its foundations as a distributor of scientific books in Britain and the United States before creating the Pergamon Press publishing house.
There was an unsuccessful bid in 1969 to acquire the News of the World and after losing control of Pergamon, he bought the British Printing Corporation, turning it into the Maxwell Communication Corporation which would eventually purchase the Mirror Group newspaper stable in 1984.
Again, a lot of this detail is glossed over as Vernon seems to be desperate to get to the bit where Robert Maxwell's body is floating in the sea.
There's a brief mention about his connections to the Eastern bloc and the suspicion that Robert Maxwell may have been a double agent for MI6 and the KGB.
It also flirts with his connections to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.
However the docuseries shies away from probing these fascinating claims in any depth.
What you do get is a focus on his acquisition of the Mirror and his fixation with building a global media empire to rival and eclipse Rupert Murdoch's.
There's an obsession with public image - the documentary notes he never actually owned Headington Hill Hall, his mansion in Oxfordshire but rented it from the local council.
Vernon shows his natural gift for schmoozing and his vanity - with a toe curlingly over the top celebration of his 65th birthday.
We are told about his Richard Nixon style obsession for making secret tapes, including recordings of his executives' phone calls.
Former Sunday Mirror editor Eve Pollard provides an intriguing observation that her appointment may have been because he found women less of a threat than men.
There's a weird story about his twentysomething daughter Ghislaine and Robert Maxwell spending five minutes on a phone call to his office in the Mirror Group, pretending to be cats miaowing.
Unfortunately, there are repeated gratuitous and tedious recreations in the first two episodes of his 22 stone body floating in the sea while actors re-enact recorded conversations Mirror Group executives were having, speculating whether his death was murder and suicide and also about the impending financial scandal that was about to engulf the company about his raid on his employees' pension funds.
We are told Ghislaine believed her father's death was suspicious and not suicide.
But where the docuseries finally hits its stride is in its depiction of Ghislaine Maxwell's rise on the New York party circuit and her association with Jeffrey Epstein and his seedy sex trafficking of underage girls.
Inheriting her father's talent for schmoozing, we see how she cultivates prominent figures like Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
However the docuseries is at its most powerful as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's victims like the Cape Town model Juliette Bryant reveal what happened to them.
Bryant chillingly reveals how she was hoodwinked into leaving South Africa for sexual slavery on his private Carribbean island, believing Epstein would help her build a modelling career in the US.
Another victim Teresa Helm disturbingly describes the sex trafficking operation as a factory with Ghislaine recruiting young girls - many from poorer backgrounds in Florida but also from around the world - for abuse.
A link between Epstein and Robert Maxwell is hinted at, with the suggestion that the financier helped Ghislaine's father hide the millions he stole from Mirror Group employees' pensions.
But in many ways, this revelation is typical of a frustrating docuseries.
It is yet another piece of information that is tantalisingly dangled at the audience, without fully probing it.
Instead of doing the hard yards, 'House of Maxwell' seems desperate to reach for 'Succession' style images of a family mired in scandal.
Vernon's docuseries unfortunately is more interested in gloss and that ultimately does its viewers a great disservice.
('House of Maxwell' was broadcast on BBC2 between April 4-18, 2022)
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