Secrets of the Chippendales Murders, review: fails to do this outlandish tale justice

Male strippers are not for me, but perhaps that’s because the only one I’ve ever seen was in an Australian backpackers’ pub on Acton High Street. The passage of time means I have forgotten quite how I ended up there (I am not, nor have ever been, an Australian backpacker) but the memory of him removing his G-string remains vivid.

The success of male stripping saga Magic Mike – a Hollywood trilogy, and now a hit West End show – highlights that there’s definitely a market for the more glamorous side of things. And for that we have to thank Steve Banerjee and Nick De Noia, the protagonists in Secrets of the Chippendales Murders (BBC Two). Banerjee opened the first Chippendales club, in Los Angeles, in the 1980s. He was the business brain, while De Noia came on board as the creative director who brought Broadway pizzazz to the shows. Both ended up dead in an outlandish tale involving murder, sex, Swiss bank accounts and cyanide.

All the ingredients are there for a rip-roaring tale but this four-part documentary fails to do it justice (and is the second to do it, after Amazon’s Curse of the Chippendales). The Disney+ dramatisation Welcome to Chippendales had its faults – it Disneyfied some pretty unlikeable people – but it gave us Banerjee’s backstory: a straitlaced petrol station attendant from Mumbai who initially planned to run a backgammon club. 

This documentary gives us none of that. In fact, it gets the pacing all wrong – dramatic events are given scant attention (the first murder is out of the way by the 10-minute mark) but the series is far too long, padded out with Christian Right complaints and red herrings about the Mafia. It is so slackly edited that the same 911 call is played three times.

Recollections vary. “It wasn’t a crazy sex place,” insists the only female producer involved in the enterprise, talking about the Chippendales club in New York, while the male dancers fondly recalled doing it with audience members in the VIP room, the car park, somewhere they liked to call “the Orgy Room”, and the men’s toilet (“because there were no men in there”).

The jealousy and fatal rivalry that built up between Banerjee and De Noia is laid out by those who knew them, but we still don’t get under Banerjee’s skin. No-one knows what happened to his fortune. At the end, his son says: “I’m going to find my dad’s millions” – a search which would be exciting if it actually happened, but here is just a wasted line.