“It's not very nice for the viewer [ ...] If I wanted to look at things like this, I'd have become a GP.” Read on for the full verdict on last night's TV.

Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture, BBC4
“You might be a little sceptical about the broad demographic appeal of Mud, Sweat and Tractors, a four-part examination of agricultural history in the 20th Century. We're not talking Victorian Farm here, after all, with lots of dressing up and ginger-beer making. We're talking about a programme in which the passage of the 1947 Agriculture Act counts as a dramatic narrative twist.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture, BBC4
“Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture is not in fact, attempting to tell us the story of agriculture. If it was, it would have started somewhere in Turkey or Iraq, about 10,000 years ago, instead of the West Country just after the Second World War.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture, BBC4
“The diary farmers have gone one of two ways: supermarket suppliers or bespoke organic, and their absorbing story was narrated by Charles Collingwood, who plays Brian Aldridge, The Archers' J.R Ewing, which gave this cogently related history of economic pressures, profit-making and quotas and added frisson. You half expected Lynda Snell to make a beaky cameo.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

Embarrassing Bodies, C4
“The show loves to make you flinch, zooming in as a catheter is pushed up to Peter's leaky penis to establish the exact nature of his incontinence problem or giving you a clinical close-up of a verruca so rampant that it appears to have eaten half of a girl's foot. But is also as bizarre as it might seem to the people who first came up with the concept public-service television.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

Embarrassing Bodies, C4
“It's not very nice for the viewer [ ...] If I wanted to look at things like this, I'd have become a GP.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

The Apprentice, BBC1
“As soon as the contestants of the first Big Brother realised that the nature of the project wasn't a piece of groundbreaking ethnography they struck up a song, ‘It's only a game show'. Despite the shirt-and-tie drag of business, The Apprentice is the same, never more so last night when a perfectly-good contestant was fired and an under-performing ranter was saved to fight, and bark another week.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

The Apprentice, BBC1
“Who said The Apprentice was anything to do with real life? Sir Alan? Well, he's lying. It's about one thing - entertainment - and it's bloody good at it, too.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

Alan Wicker's Journey of a Lifetime, BBC2
“A nostalgic look at an age where we sat at home and let a handful of chaps - Wicker, Paul Theroux etc - wander the globe on our behalf.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

Grand Designs, C4
“There was something slightly terrifying about people being lent the best part of a million pounds just because they are determined to have a dream home. Hasn't our obsession with houses and the easiness of debt got us into enough bother?”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

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