Canoe man is one of those stories you just couldn’t make up

For the programme makers, the story of John Darwin was the gift that just kept giving – a story where fact was definitely stranger than fiction. James Rampton talks to them

Eddie Marsan plays the canoe fraudster, with downtrodden wife Anne played by Monica Dolan (ITV)

Even now, 20 years after it began, the story of John Darwin, the so-called “Canoe Man”, sinks all attempts at credible explanation. It simply defies belief. The tale of John – who in 2002 faked his own death in a canoeing accident, got his wife Anne to brazenly lie to their two sons Mark and Anthony that he had died, and hid in the bedsit next-door to the family home before being rumbled five years later – epitomises that well-worn phrase, “fact is stranger than fiction”.

The writer Chris Lang, who has turned the Darwins’ story into The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, a riveting four-part drama that starts tonight, emphasises that it was this unbelievable quality that initially drew him to this yarn. “The ‘fact is stranger than fiction’ aspect was the first thing that I thought of as I was turning the opening page of the research.”

As he started reading this incredible story, he recalls: “It just kept on delivering incredible twists and turns. It was like a very, very twisted fairytale. There is something very ‘other’ about the Darwins’ world.