Telly Review: Channel 4's Imposter is compelling storytelling

Imposter: The Man Who Came Back from the Dead

IMPOSTER: The Man Who Came Back from the Dead (Channel 4 and the Channel 4 app) is ludicrously good.

Like all the best true crime documentaries, this four-parter gets access to the main players. 

It’s engaging because the story is a winner — man allegedly fakes his own death after being on the FBI most-wanted list in connection with multiple rapes, and rocks up in Glasgow.

 I’m sure Frankie Boyle would make a very funny joke about this that we couldn’t print here.

The reason it’s ludicrously good is because the man accused of faking his own death is a ludicrous character. 

His name is Arthur Knight in Glasgow, or Nicholas Rossi in the US, where he was a registered sex offender. 

His Arthur Knight persona has the vibe of a failed medieval history lecturer in a minor university who gets his fashion look from David Norris. 

Dark three-piece suit, fedora or trilby, rounded off with an ever-present oxygen mask that may or may not have been a handy way to conceal his face.

But this is not the end of the story. 

Imposter: The Man Who Came Back from the Dead

The first episode starts with Nicholas Rossi’s father explaining how he put his son into care in his early teens because he couldn’t control him. 

Rossi takes to spending a lot of his time at the State House in Rhode Island, where he becomes famous when he makes accusations of sexual and physical abuse while in care.

It later emerges that his wounds were self-inflicted and he was investigated for carrying out such acts on other kids in care.

At this point, we get into the harrowing heart of the story, where female victims of his crimes describe controlling behaviour and rape. 

One of those women speaks of her relief when she hears that he died of a rare cancer. 

So you can imagine her shock when he crops up on telly as Arthur Knight, denying at extradition hearings in the UK that he has anything to do with Nicholas Rossi, something he still denies today. (It doesn’t help his case that he had similar tattoos to Rossi although he claims he was given these while unconscious with covid in hospital.)

The intriguing bits are when we see Knight, who claimed to have run away from an orphanage in Dublin at the age of 14, and his wife Miranda, a well-adjusted woman who believes that Knight and Rossi are two different people.

She clearly loves him and is distraught that her genteel life with him in Glasgow is being torn apart by his apparent past.

It’s compelling storytelling — give it a watch.