On Sunday, December 23 at 8.30pm on BBC One (and for a week thereafter in the BBC iPlayer) you can see Victoria Wood's film Loving Miss Hatto which tells the story of a pianist, her husband and one of the major frauds of our time. The film stars Maimie McCoy as the young Joyce Hatto and Francesca Annis as Hatto in older age; her husband, William Barrington-Coupe ('Barrie'), is played by Rory Kinnear and, as his older self, by Alfred Molina. 

James Jolly went to talk to Victoria Wood about her approach to the story – a conversation you can listen to in the Gramophone Player (below) – but first a brief reminder of the events. (You can also read the original article which broke the story written by Gramophone's former editor James Inverne and the follow-up article based on a letter from Barrington-Coupe to BIS's Robert von Bahr.)

In the early 2000s, piano-lovers were suddenly struck by the playing of a hitherto little-known pianist Joyce Hatto. She'd made a couple of commercial classical discs, yet recordings of extraordinary musicality and technique were appearing on the Concert Artist Recording label. The critics, in Gramophone and elsewhere, were struck by the playing and the reviews were highly favourable. Then one day Gramophone's New York-based critic Jed Distler, after a tip-off from Brian Ventura, slipped one of the discs into his computer and the Gracenote search identified it as a recording by another pianist. Questions were soon asked and, following waveform analysis by Pristine Classical's Andrew Rose, it appeared that the recordings claimed to be by Joyce Hatto were actually those of other pianists, often slightly altered. Hatto died in June 2006 and Barrington-Coupe claims that his wife knew nothing of the fraud.

Gramophone broke the story in February 2007 winning James Inverne a Press Gazette prize for Exclusive of the Year.