“Cut it in half and there’s a potentially great comedy.” Read on for the verdict on last night’s TV.

Fresh Meat

Fresh Meat, Channel 4

“It is going off. This may partly be because Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong delegated the second episode to the writer Tony Roche, but more likely the dramatis personae they invented are simply not interesting or funny enough.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“It all felt slightly laboured, in particular the usually wonderful Robert Webb as the needy, seedy geology lecturer – a character racing headlong into bad caricature. Most of all, at an hour, it just felt too long for the random emptiness of student life. Cut it in half and there’s a potentially great comedy.”
John Crace, The Guardian

Who Do You Think You Are, BBC1

“Madeley looked stunned when he learned his ancestors had been involved in what was essentially genocide against Native Americans in what is now New England and an immensely moving moment took place when he discussed what had happened with a descendant of one of the few indigenous people who survived.”
Virginia Blackburn, The Express

“This felt like one of the least staged shows of the series. And for that we have to thank Richard, because for a celeb he has an enjoyably low bullshit threshold. When he says he had a very happy childhood you believe him, because you know that if he had been sexually abused by Catholic priests he would cheerfully tell us. Several times over.”
John Crace, The Guardian

Ultimate Emergency Bikers, Channel 5

“Bikers don’t always have a good reputation but these men were emergency paramedics and policemen working on, literally, matters of life and death.”
Virginia Blackburn, The Express

Grand Designs, Channel 4

“Typically it leaves me envious of other people’s homes and horrified by the expense and difficulty of turning mine own into one of them. Occassionally, however, a building project comes along that simply sweeps you away, and last night’s restoration of the abandoned lifeboat station on Tenny Bay, Pembrokeshire, was one such.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“I don’t think I’m imagining that McCloud has been a lot harder to please in this series, much less likely to quell his aesthetic doubts when the final reveal comes. But the end result here left him with nothing to quibble about.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

Topics