16 Sep '11

“He loves a lot of things does Billy, which, along with the unbridled pleasure at his own jokes, could easily be a bit off-putting. Indiscriminate enthusiasm and comic self-regard aren’t always winning characteristics. Somehow, though, he gets away with it.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Part travelogue, part history lesson, part stand-up routine, this four parter looks like being an enjoyable meander…I’d find Connolly funnier if he didn’t spend quite so much time poleaxed with mirth at his own jokes.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The authored travelogue is just dull, dull, dull…especially when it’s just driving across America. Something almost all of us could do ourselves if we wanted to. Everything about these shows rings false. They are sold as an exercise in spontaneity…but we all know the programme is scripted to within an inch of its life.”
John Crace, The Guardian 

“Gerry Dawson had framed his film about the history of postcards (and how deliciously BBC4 is that?) as a kind of fiction… Unfortunately, having once been taken up the conceit couldn’t be dropped, however awkwardly it got in the way of what would otherwise have been a perfectly entertaining miscellany of postcard history and aesthetics.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“A film that pretty much ripped up the BBC4 factual programming rulebook. And was all the better for it…  Nigel’s introduction was a stroke of genius, his scepticism matching that of all those viewers such as myself who found themselves wondering what on earth they were doing watching a programme about postcards. It quickly got even better with Nigel doing a comic picture postcard deconstruction of how to make a documentary in the course of making one.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“It managed to humanise the crisis without excusing its perpetrators… If the programme had a fault, it was to make the division between the would-be regulators and the unregulatable too Manichean.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“When I saw how this important narrative was being sold I was sceptical, but [Mishal] Husain justified her sexed-up title.” 
Andrew Billen, The Times