Maxwell (BBC2, 9pm)

Whatever else he achieved in his colourful business life, Press baron Robert Maxwell will be remembered as the man who fiddled the Mirror Pension Fund. So it's fitting that this 90-minute film about his later years should open with him filming a message to his employees.

"Hi, I'm Robert Maxwell, and I am here to talk to you about your pension," he says addressing the camera - as if anyone would mistake this larger-than-life character for anyone else.

"You can trust me when I say you must not opt out of your company pension plan."

In the light of what we know now about his manipulation of pension money, a word like "trust" is clearly the wrong one.

Far from painting Maxwell as a villain who robbed his employees of the money for their retirement, this drama shows that he was continuing his usual financial practices of moving money from one place to pay his debts in another place. A sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul set-up.

"We just have to keep each bank at bay for 24 hours. That way we have 100 million extra to play with," he explains.

Craig Warner's script doesn't excuse his actions but does paint a portrait of a business world where creative accounting was par for the course for someone who had 400 companies.

When someone tells him that profits are down, he points out that's only on paper.

"I can make it disappear overnight," he says like some financial Paul Daniels. "We need to do something that looks good."

Those around him are confident he'll find a way out. "You've been on the brink of disaster since the day we met, you always find a way out," says his wife Betty.

The script is full of dialogue in which sums of money most find impossible to imagine are bandied about - three billion here, 800 million there and to the security guard, "give yourself a pay rise". Maxwell was a generous man, forever giving presents to staff and ensuring office fridges were stocked with champagne to entertain visitors.

David Suchet exchanges Hercule Poirot's persona to give us a persuasive Maxwell. This isn't a total physical impersonation. He doesn't seem fat enough, although the hair and eyebrows are impressive. But the actor does enough to suggest Maxwell and make us forget we're watching Suchet.

What Warner doesn't do, and I wish he had because Maxwell is a fascinating character whatever you think of his actions, is explore his background to try and explain why he did what he did.

We are given a sense of his rivalry with another media mogul, Rupert Murdoch. Maxwell is obsessed with being top dog, getting employees to count the number of reference of each of them in the daily newspapers.

His unorthodox marriage is almost dealt with in passing. We learn that he and Betty have been married for 47 years but live in separate houses.

There is talk of nine children (although Maxwell seems to think it's eight) and the son we see, his business associate Kevin, is treated like a lackey and routinely humiliated in meetings.

The film admits at the start that some dramatic liberties have been taken.

I don't know whether he did conduct meetings on the roof of skyscraper buildings. When one visitor says he needs to go to the toilet, Maxwell orders him to pee over the edge of the roof. He even joins him in the ritual.

And did his secretary's rejection of his advances really trigger an emotional breakdown that caused him to neglect his business dealings? It feels too much like a device to bring matters to a dramatic conclusion.

That's not to say Patricia Hodge, as long-suffering Betty, and My Family regular Daniela Denby-Ashe, as the secretary he desires, aren't excellent as the two women in his life.

His actual death, falling overboard from his yacht and drowning, is reported rather than shown. Headlines from papers of the day recount the pensions scandal. At that moment, words we've heard him say on the film earlier: "Remember, we have plans for your money", take on a different meaning."