“There’s almost nothing so delicious on the small screen as a hippy eating humble pie.” Read on for the verdict on last night’s TV.

WHAT THE GREEN MOVEMENT GOT WRONG, C4

“There’s almost nothing so delicious on the small screen as a hippy eating humble pie; except maybe a whole parade of them, exhibited over an hour, and packed into a documentary prosecuting the intellectual crimes of a pressure group who claim to speak for the zeitgeist.”
Amol Rajan, The Independent

“Where this film really failed was in its sense of cause and effect. To assume the international rejection of nuclear energy and GM foods was all down to environmental pressure groups is absurd. Yet this was the central premise: that global economic policy over the past 30 years had been entirely shaped by well-meaning but woolly minded greens.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“What, it seems [it] got wrong was not to make it clear to Adam Werback, a former president of the Sierra Club conservation group that it was making a polemic, and he…has kicked up a fuss. A pity because [it] got a lot right it seemed to me.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

EGO: THE STRANGE AND WONDERFUL WORLD OF SELF-PORTRAITS, BBC4

“Observer art critic Laura Cumming has that all too rare TV gift of being able to explain brainy stuff without making you feel stupid.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“Stunning, unashamed high-brow television from first minute to last. Much like John Berger years before, Cumming has an accessible enthusiasm for her specialist subject, talking evocatively about art without being patronising.”
Amol Rajan, The Independent

“[It] started out as a terrific book that someone bright at BBC4 realised would work just as well as television, if not better. It was dead dramatic…The film was a little too much to take in over 90 minutes. It needs to be reedited into three half hours.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

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