Oliver Twist, BBC1
“ -it all looks wonderful - bad skin, bad teeth, muck, food symbolism all over the place. On my new flat-screen TV (at last!), it’s like having my own Hogarth come to life in my living room.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian
Oliver Twist, BBC1
“This adaptation was penned by former Eastenders scriptwriter Sarah Phelps, though, and perhaps that’s why it’s so good at putting the ghastliness of Victorian London back where Dickens intended it to be.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express
Oliver Twist, BBC1
“Alas, this version, part Christmas panto, part spot the cameo [ -] was a strangely juvenile assemblage of familiar Now That’s What I Call a Twist moments that never once cohered as an original or particularly inventive narrative experience.”
Kevin Maher, The Times
Oliver Twist, BBC1
“I struggled last night, I really struggled to apprehend what exactly was being achieved in yet another retelling of Dicken’s 1837 novel, Oliver Twist.”
Deborah Orr, The Independent
Oliver Twist, BBC1
“As Cranford has just proved (like Bleak House before it), costume dramas work best when the makers have faith in the original novel, and in the whole costume-drama form. Here, there’s a distinct sense of a BBC committee somewhere having nervously decided that both are a bit old hat.”
James Walton, The Telegraph
Reunited, BBC1
“ -is a moving film that follows three women trying to find parents they’ve never known.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian
Reunited, BBC1
“what really marked out last night’s programme was the quality of the interviews with everybody concerned. Julie, Carol and Christine all spoke with remarkable honesty about the conflicting emotions they felt: from terror to excitement, from the self-protecting determination not to hope that everything would be instantly resolved to the hope that everything would be instantly resolved.”
James Walton, The Telegraph
My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist, C4
“Monica Garnsey’s My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist was an exemplary documentary, content to point a patient camera at human misery and exploitation, watching the pity, the cruelty and the waste unfold.”
Deborah Orr, The Independent
My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist, C4
“ -mostly the show wasn’t smart enough to allow its anonymity to solidify into an ironic commentary, or a wry critique. Instead, no matter what way you cut it, it was promotion.”
Kevin Maher, The Times
Cut Up Kids, BBC3
“ -may sound like an instruction in a sinister recipe book, but is actually another lovely film about friendship, this time between Tor and Gary, two young self-harmers.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian
Spooks, BBC1
“There’s enough grounding in real world affairs to give Spooks a kind of plausibility. But there’s no holding back on action, either. It’s like John Le Carré on speed.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian
Columbia’s final flight: The True Story, Five
“why a programme about the inherently dramatic explosion of a spacecraft hurtling through the sky at 17,000 miles an hour felt the need to use multiple split-screens, partial re-enactments and thumping action soundtrack in a superfluous attempt to ramp up tension is anyone’s guess.”
Kevin Maher, The Times
Storyville: The Monastery - Mr Vig and the Nun, BBC4
“ -patience, in the end, brought its own satisfying reward in this little gem of a film.”
Patricia Wynn Davies, The Telegraph
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