Read on for the full verdict on last night’s TV. “Asks the questions we all want to ask.”

The Frankincense Trail

The Frankincense Trail, BBC2
“At one point there was a little tantrum about the treatment of women, but come on, love. You’re in Saudi Arabia. Just what did you expect?”
Virginia Blackburn, Daily Express

The Frankincense Trail, BBC2
“What makes Kate so great: she’s normal. She says what we’re all thinking and asks the questions we all want to ask.”
Alice-Azania Jarvis, The Independent

The Frankincense Trail, BBC2
“Humble and her team were happy simply to be granted an audience. It is one thing to boast that you have access to a closed kingdom, quite another to find yourself coated, unquestioningly, in its whitewash.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

Benefit Busters, C4
“As with its predecessors, part three of Benefit Busters proved an insightful, not unchallenging bit of documentary from Channel 4, all the more valuable for its handling of what could, under other circumstances, have turned into a bit of eye-rolling them-and-us bear-baiting.”
Alice-Azania Jarvis, The Independent

The Funny Side of TV Experts, BBC2
“This was the last chance saloon of clip shows; we had seen the clips before on every other clip show and all Anderson had to do was kill each familiar retread with a a terrible line.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

How Clean Is Your House?, C4
“The ladies staged a roadshow in which they demonstrated that the way to get household items clean was, er, to wash them. You wouldn’t have thought this was a lesson most people needed.”
Virginia Blackburn, Daily Express

How Clean Is Your House?, C4
“It’s one of that peculiar breed of Channel 4 programmes. Shock viewing, gross-out TV; tamer than Extreme Makeover, but revolting nonetheless.”
Alice-Azania Jarvis, The Independent

Outbreak, ITV1
“It was impressively researched, with colourful, funny and moving contributions from actors, former soldiers and evacuees.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

Outbreak, ITV1
“Melvyn Bragg narrates, in that hurried, slightly bored-sounding way he has. Almost as if it’s a read-through, a  rehearsal for ther eal thing. Come on Melv, that’s OK for a South Bank Show about Tracey Emin, but this is the war – a bit more Churchillian, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

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