20 Nov, '09

“We all know that people hate traffic wardens, but the scenes in which the new recruits and old hands were mocked, spat at, reviled and almost always racially abused were still extraordinary.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Just as Durga and some of his colleagues had a certain set of illusions about ‘Merrie England’ shattered by jobs, so the makers of this programme might have been suckered by the same thing.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Powerful, heartbreaking and shaming… This was a documentary of many layers.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

“The uncomfortable thing about this type of documentary; it follows a group of people with Down’s, or learning difficulties, with the express aim of teaching us such people are exactly the same as us… but making a doc about them says the opposite; that they are unusual, extraordinary and different.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“A moving, striking and insightful film.”
Alice-Azania Jones, The Independent

“Vanessa Stockley’s great success was to observe them as a couple first – running a home, loving, bickering – and a couple with Down’s second.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

“It was a slight film that focused entirely on the couple and left unexamined any wider considerations… But, as a nuanced portrait of two people leading the kind of lives rarely seen at length on screen, it served its own valuable purpose.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“There’s every cliché in the teen-drama book… It wasn’t that bad. Good, even. Smart, and funny, and odd.”
Alice Azania-Jones, The Independent