30 Aug '11

“In this gentle, witty one-off, Bill Nighy played Johnny Worricker, an MI5 man of the old school… no single event could be more shocking for him than discovering that the Prime Minister had been supplied with intelligence that could have saved British lives on British soil but had failed to act on it or own up to it. It’s hard for a TV audience to share the outrage. Do any of us genuinely believe that governments tell the truth?”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“There are lots of good scenes in Page Eight, written and directed by David Hare. As usual Hare tackles the world head-on. There may or may not be a nod to the Hutton inquiry. There’s certainly more than a nod to the Chilcot and to Gibson. It is a world where politics operates in amoral vacuum. It is our world. Classy television.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“With a cast this good it was never going to be less than stylish. But the sense of retro-pastiche … never quite dissipated. It wasn’t just that all these actors were playing well within their own capacities but also that Hare’s script sounded worryingly familiar.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“The start of the feature-length spy drama by writer and director David Hare was promising enough - the old fashioned jazz-scored title sequence boasted a cast list that could easily grace a major cinema release… Hare is a dab hand at political drama with a fine pedigree. What could go wrong? There were too many plot strands…. Too much of the script clunked badly and there were moments of unintentional hilarity.”
David Hayles, The Times

“It was lively and inventive, but either by accident or design (Moffat hates spoilers) my preview copy froze about 35 minutes in and I found I could deal with the lack of resolution.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“These mountains of irritable blubber trek from the South Pole to the Falkland Islands every spring in order to lie on the beach, impregnate hundreds of females and fight each other. It all looked terribly primal and bestial. However, add a bit of sunshine and some regional English accents and you could have been looking at Ibiza in July.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“Like The Killing, Field of Blood understands that it’s not the crime that’s interesting, so much as what it does to the people affected by it.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Terrific new crime drama introduced us to Patricia ‘Paddy’ Mehan (the convincing, likeable Jayd Johnson) a young would-be journalist working as a copy girl on the male-dominated The Glasgow Daily News in the early 1980s. The 18980s newspaper setting – all cigarette smoke, pot bellies, typewriters and hidden bottles of Scotch, was sheer bliss.”
David Hayles, The Times

“It’s terrific. A taut and pacy murder mystery it hums along at a fair lick. But then Jayd Johnson, as Paddy Mehan, the ambitious but unconfident boiled-egg-popping wannabe hack with a complicated Catholic domestic life, adds a depth and humanity that takes it beyond (and above) Ashes to Ashes territory. There are fine performances all over the place.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Even the best efforts of the witty Steven Fry couldn’t save the show… After 100 minutes or so I began to wish the TV set had never been invented. After 180 I felt the same about the whole universe.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“May have had the nation’s favourite twitterer in charge but it was till a Channel 4 countdown clips’n’c-words show – ie a bunch of comedians and TV presenters come and talk rubbish because they want to be on the telly. Most of what they say is fantastically uninteresting.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“There was some fun to be had here, but you had to go quite a long way to get it. Honestly… a hundred gadgets? Was that really necessary? After an astonishing three hours of programming time, I can’t have been the only person thinking that the DVD machine and fast-forward deserved a higher placing.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Why do so many people continue to believe” asked The Conspiracy Files, questioning the dogmatic belief of 9/11 truthers that it was all a government set-up. They could have saved 58 minutes of our time by answering, “Because they’re credulous fools”.
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Examined the evens of that terrible day from two angles: first, from the point of view conspiracy theorists who believe it was an inside job. And then from those who uphold the official verdict on what happened. Some of the conspiracies … seemed compelling. But when the structural engineer who built the towers explained why they came down as they did, it looked less like a government plot than an appalling tragedy. One thing is certain – the footage shown during the film of the towers coming down isn’t any less shocking ten years after the fact. If anything, it is more so.”
David Hayles, The Times

“An eye-opening, not always uplifting but enjoyable look at life in central London’s quarter-square mile of sleaze.”
Matt Baylis, The Express