24 Nov '10

“There are lots of good moments in Hannah Rothschild’s film. Some of it is already familiar: the barracking of George Osborne after one of the televised debates; that dance, a rictus-grin two-step with a lady in the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. But better are the moments that aren’t orchestrated by the man himself, like the time Rothschild catches him with his trousers down.”
Sam Wallaston, The Guardian

“’You’ve got to stop acting in such an imperial way,’ Tony Blair once told Peter Mandelson, according to the Prince of Darkness’s own account. On the evidence of Hannah Rothschild’s film he doesn’t appear to have taken the advice. Less fly-on-the-wall than lady-in-waiting, this account of five months in the life of the Business Secretary showed him to be imperial to the hilt.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“The title of Hannah Rothchild’s extraordinary documentary was designed to scare. Was she suggesting that Lord Mandelson had effectively been PM during the Brown government’s death throes? By the end of 75 minutes and six months, I took comfort that he had been too busy making himself look important actually to have been that important.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Central to its appeal was the promise we’d see how Peter Mandelson really ran the country under Labour or we’d see what the man was really like underneath that faintly smiling and slow-blinking mask, or both. As it happens the film delivered on neither but it proved interesting enough for us not to care.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“It told the average viewer far more about the history of the trade than they could have swallowed. It wasn’t so much the drowning in detail that rankled as the depressing point being made.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“BBC1’s slightly unpersuasive exercise in immersive history reaches the Second World War this week, bringing in food shortages, queuing and night-time air raids.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent