How I fell for a con artist: The bizarre true story of a husband who tricked the world into thinking his wife was a virtuoso pianist - and one woman's obsession with it

When Joyce Hatto succumbed to cancer in 2006, aged 77, the obituaries spoke as one. The world had lost one of the most gifted British pianists ever — the breadth of her repertoire as prolific as it was prodigious.
Yet, within a year, that shining reputation was not only tarnished, it had been trashed out of all recognition.
Her husband and agent, William Barrington- Coupe, had perpetrated a monstrous deceit from their house in a quiet cul-de-sac in Royston, Hertfordshire, by splicing the playing of other pianists on to more than 100 recordings released under Joyce’s name in her final years.

Obsession: Victoria Wood spend three years researching the life of Joyce Hatto to be able to tell her story in new BBC film Loving Miss Hatto

The CDs were a patchwork of other pianists’ work, digitally manipulated to disguise their origins. The audacious fraud was laid bare after Joyce’s death, first by an exposé in Gramophone magazine, followed up by a lengthy dissection in The New Yorker.
And now the incredible story has been made into a beautifully realised film for TV, Loving Miss Hatto — the result of three years’ painstaking research by comedienne Victoria Wood. ‘I felt like a journalist as I began hunting down all the different threads,’ she says.
Despite the wide coverage, Joyce’s story had passed Victoria by. ‘But then I was sent The New Yorker article,’ she says, ‘and I found it irresistible. Partly it was the oddness of the story of this elderly couple, but also that they were practising their deceit on the whole world via the internet from their suburban house. It was the conjunction of those two people and modern technology that caught my interest.’

In tune: Joyce Hatto, who died a fraud in 2006

So who exactly was Joyce Hatto, once dubbed ‘the greatest living pianist almost no one has ever heard of’ before becoming more famous — notorious, even — for what she hadn’t played than what she had? A promising young professional musician, Joyce had performed at concerts in London and throughout Britain and Europe from the Fifties, including solo recitals at the Wigmore and Queen Elizabeth halls.
She’d also been a repetiteur — someone who stands in for the star pianist at orchestra rehearsals — under eminent conductors such as Sir Thomas Beecham. And she supplemented her income by working in recording studios for companies in the UK, Germany and France, and by teaching.
But she had always been an  anxious public performer, egged on by her husband Barrington-Coupe — known as Barrie — who’d fallen in love with her at their first meeting.
Here was a man, a likeable chancer, who sometimes sailed too close to the wind. Indeed, not long into their marriage he served a short prison sentence (much to Joyce’s horror) for importing radios from the Far East while neglecting to pay the appropriate tax. But, for all that, he was the love of Joyce’s life.
Rory Kinnear, who plays Barrie persuasively as a young man in the new film, says the wrongdoings ‘all trickle down from his complete devotion to her’.
In the mid-Seventies, at a concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Joyce’s nerves finally got the better of her and she abandoned the piano mid-recital — never to perform in public again.
But Barrie was determined she should play on — at least as far as the record-buying public was concerned — and so an astonishing deception was born, with other classical pianists’ work being released as her own.
In the end, says Victoria, this is a love story. And yet she thinks it would have been better if Joyce and Barrie hadn’t met. ‘They were the cause of each other’s downfall,’ she explains. ‘If they’d never met, perhaps Barrie would have been more successful in the music industry, and Joyce would have been perfectly content as a  music teacher.’
Having researched the story so meticulously, does Victoria believe that Joyce knew about Barrie’s illicit recordings? ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she says emphatically. ‘How could she not have known? And I hope she did because I like to think of them doing it together and getting some fun out of it.’
The more Victoria worked on her script, the more she regarded the deception as secondary to the couple’s relationship. ‘In the end, it shrank down to being the story of a marriage and of how, as the years go on, you get bashed about by life. I certainly don’t stand in judgment on what they did.
‘Nobody’s blameless. We’ve all done things we regret. We’ve all made mistakes. But this is my imagining of their story. It’s about high hopes and disappointment.’
The younger Joyce is exquisitely portrayed by Maimie McCoy, while the older Barrie and Joyce are faultlessly played by Alfred Molina and Francesca Annis.
Francesca says: ‘The way I see it, Joyce didn’t feel able to serve music as she would have wished. But then Barrie wasn’t able to serve her in the way he wanted by turning her into a successful concert pianist and recording artist.’

Content: Had she not met her husband, Victoria Wood believes Joyce, played by Maimie McCoy, would have been happy as a music teacher

In fact, Loving Miss Hatto may well give the real-life Barrie — who is now 82 and living in the same house in Hertfordshire — pause for thought. Victoria has never met him, quite deliberately, she says, because it would have been impossible to get him out of her head. ‘I’ve no idea what he’s going to think of what I’ve written,’ she adds. ‘I can’t even second-guess.
‘But I hope he sees it as a sympathetic portrayal and as a love story, which is what I intended. Both Rory Kinnear and Alfred Molina show him as a very loving husband. To be honest, I don’t really care what he thinks, although I wouldn’t want him to be upset.’
Would she agree to meet him if he asked? ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel any great need. This is my imagining of what happened based on the magazine article. But if he wrote to me, I’d write back, yes.’
The drama was filmed entirely in Dublin, although you’d never know it. ‘I don’t think you’d ever suspect, for instance, that the house you see in the film wasn’t actually in Royston,’ says Victoria. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve driven past the real house. I wanted to see what it was like. But what I couldn’t have known was that Barrie would be standing outside on the pavement at the time.’ She tried to nail down the details of the story as closely as possible. ‘It was a painstaking process to read through two thick folders of research trying to understand who Joyce was, who Barrie was, then meeting people who’d worked with them.
‘My proudest moment was when I saw in a tiny clipping a woman’s name and we actually tracked her down. She was an old mate of Joyce and I went to visit her. Every little bit of information — Joyce never answered the doorbell or the phone, for example, and loved watching Monkey World on TV — all sunk in and eventually rose to the surface in my story.’
Does Victoria find it easier to watch a piece of work she’s written if she’s not in it? ‘Oh yes, it’s lovely,’ she says. ‘I never enjoy seeing myself.’
So she wasn’t tempted to give herself a fleeting cameo walk-on role, Alfred Hitchcock-style? ‘No, because people would then be wondering what Victoria Wood was doing suddenly popping up in this story. As it was, I could sit back and watch the finished film and admire the shots and performances. ‘It’s taken a long time to bring it to the screen but I’ve been lucky in that top-quality people have been involved. It feels like it’s been really well put together by a great team. I’m proud of it.’
For Victoria, these are the years when she can put herself first again. Her two children, Grace, 23, and Henry, 20, from her marriage to magician Geoffrey Durham — aka The Great Soprendo — are free agents. Grace, a choral scholar, has been reading French and Italian at Cambridge, while Henry is studying music technology at Leeds.
Work, Victoria says without apology, is what now defines her. She certainly seems to have her foot on the accelerator, producing a succession of projects that are as well received as they are varied.
Yet surprisingly, she disputes the high volume of her output. ‘People say that I’m prolific but I don’t feel that at all,’ she says. ‘I think I’m really slow.’
The evidence suggests otherwise. She’s just putting the finishing touches to a two-part documentary on tea.

Deceit: The story about the music fraud of pianist Joyce Hatto, played in old age by Francesca Annis, has been filmed for a new television film

‘The first part deals with the history of tea in China and India and the opium wars. We then trace the arrival of tea in Britain and how it went from being a luxury product to being something that everybody drinks. The second episode is more to do with its social history and what tea means to British people.’
After that, Victoria will set to work turning her play about a choir — That Day We Sang — into a 90-minute musical for television. ‘This time I’ll be able to have a large children’s choir and lots of singing and dancing,’ she says.
‘In the theatre for its ten performances as part of the Manchester Festival last year, we were constrained by a tight budget. There was a cast of just 12, so a lot of the writing was to do with getting people offstage so they could change into different costumes and come back on again.’
She shows no sign of slowing down, despite the fact she’ll be 60 in May. Does she worry about ageing? ‘Not much. I feel really fortunate being someone who loves what she does, and I can carry on doing it for as long as I want and for as long as I’m wanted.
‘There’s still so much more I want to do. I have ideas pinned to the noticeboard in my office. They can remain there for ages, like That Day We Sang.’
And the next project?  ‘There’s a tiny acorn of a comedy idea. But I don’t even know if it will be for stage or screen.’
Even so, Victoria will break soon for Christmas. ‘I’m just going to be with my children and watch telly, although we’re going to one of my sisters on Christmas Day. I cooked last year.’
She needs little encouragement to talk about what she likes to watch — and it couldn’t be more surprising. ‘My absolute favourite is Snapped: Women Who Kill, a true-life U.S. series shown here on the Crime & Investigation channel.
‘I’m fascinated by all these people who suddenly pick up a gun and shoot somebody just because they’re a bit cross with them. I’m transfixed by the awfulness of their actions.
‘You and I might fling a plate of dinner at someone but, this being America, they’ll pick up a rifle and blow somebody’s head off. And they never seem to appreciate the consequences. There’s often footage from their police interviews and trials, and it’s really interesting.
‘And I love The Great British Bake Off and MasterChef. I watch University Challenge with Grace and Henry. We probably each get five answers right.
‘I can’t bear anything where people get humiliated. So I can’t be doing with X Factor. I used to watch Strictly, although all those formulaic shows become a bit predictable.’
Victoria has lost count of the times she’s been approached to take part in reality shows. ‘I think people have got the message by now,’ she says. ‘Anything I do privately, I wouldn’t want to do on television because it would spoil it for me.’