This risibly sombre, laughably self-important documentary about the felling of the tree on Hadrian’s Wall is 90 minutes of your life that you will never get back

I

t’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.

DI Calum Meikle usually investigates homicides. “I never thought I’d be here talking about criminal damage,” he says, sombrely. But as it became clear that the local landmark, thought to have been planted about 120 years ago by the then landowner John Clayton, and made more widely famous by its appearance in the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves had been deliberately cut down, outrage mounted and the Northumbria police mobilised. “Could this have been committed by someone younger in years who hasn’t seen the potential significance of his actions?” the DI wonders to camera with an admirably straight face. Close examination of the crime scene reveals something revelatory. “We were minus the wedge. Hmm … This is interesting.” That’s the wedge – explains the programme to us in minute detail – that tree fellers cut out of a tree with chainsaws when they are felling it. It’s easier than trying to push the whole thing over, I guess. And it was probably a two-man job, so now we are looking for a duo with access to chainsaws who may possess a wooden wedge they’ve kept as a trophy.