27 Jan '10

“Some programmes peel away the prejudices, and some simply confirm them. Then there is that rare programme that leaves you with your mouth hanging slightly open, feeling thankful you are not required to make a judgement one way or another.”
Tim Dowling, The Guardian

“Contained an argument just like a Mobius strip. Your mind ran along it, convinced that there must be another side somewhere and then just ended up where it started.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“As a 52-year-old who has just had a baby, I’d better not comment.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Seven series on, I doubted whether Shameless would be worth bothering about, but somehow it is. I’ll maintain to the end that its take on the underclass is a kind of lie, but it’s a darkly funny one.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Frank remains a great creation, but Shameless itself doesn’t always seem very certain why it still exists; whenever it can’t work out how to get out of a scene, it just has one character head-butt another.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“The point is as simple and bankrupt as this: to find new situations in which Tiny Tears will weep. She duly did. Honestly, I would award this show fewer stars, but I genuinely hate to see this grown woman cry.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“His experiences were not so much a road to Damascus as a ring road, perpetually going round in circles by providing what they had already concluded. But given the channel, and the track record of the presenter, this could have been many, many times more tedious than it was.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Our household has become grouped… Not, perhaps for the reasons we were intended to be gripped but just because we’ve been wondering how long a character can go without putting on a pair of trousers.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express