TV critics' verdict on programmes - including BBC1's The Street - broadcast on 12 December 2007

The Street, BBC1
“Along comes a programme like The Street to remind you how fabulous television can be, how unambitious and determinedly stupid it usually is.”
Robert Hanks, The Independent

The Street, BBC1
 “This, the last and best play in The Street series, must have been as painful and exhilarating to write as it was to watch. I wouldn’t say it was plausible. I’d say poetic.”
Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian

The Street, BBC1
 “For all its brilliance and fluency, The Street has become a slightly pantomime game of “How will they outdo last week’s grimness?” And it does, consistently.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

Last Party at the Palace, C4
 “Although this documentary was refreshingly free of judgments, you couldn’t help feeling a twinge of something - pity, mainly - for those girls who’d been suckered into a 21st-century version of the London ‘season’.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

Last Party at the Palace, C4
 “Much store was placed on some debs today who were different from their 1950s’ peers. But they weren’t. they were posh, privileged and their gap year in Africa is the hip, modern equivalent of the society lady’s traditional diversion of charity work.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

Last Party at the Palace, C4
 “Some elements of the otherwise enjoyable film were fascinating: the rigidity of decorum, the social engineering, the sexual naivety, the incredibly low educational horizons that meant just four of that year’s 1,400 debutantes went on to university.”
Gerard O’Donovan, The Daily Telegraph

Timeshift: A Game of Two Eras, BBC4
“So what, if anything, have we lost in the intervening half-century? Well, the obvious casualties are modesty, respect, sportsmanship and - perhaps most of all - a sense of romance about the game.”
Gerard O’Donovan, The Daily Telegraph

Timeshift: A Game of Two Eras, BBC4
 “A game which uses the head as a battering ram and forbids the use of the hands is more bestial than beautiful. Which makes it all the odder that I found A Game of Two Eras so bewitching.”
Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian

Talks with Dave Fanning, Sky Arts
 “Our man spoke to The Killers, in a half-hour squirmathon where the banality of the questions was matched only by the monosyllabism of the Las Vegas band.”
Serena Davies, The Daily Telegraph

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