“So many thoughts, so many of them irreconcilable, so many of them troubling. If you saw it, they will still be hanging about your head today.” Read on for the full verdict on last night's TV.

Louis Theroux: A Place for Paedophiles, BBC2
“Louis Theroux's documentary A Place for Paedophiles last night presented a different problem: so many thoughts, so many of them irreconcilable, so many of them troubling. If you saw it, they will still be hanging about your head today, ready to leap out and, well, molest you.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

Louis Theroux: A Place for Paedophiles, BBC2
“Seventy per cent of the inmates decline to take part in the programme, resentful men whose bitterness seems a compound of dangerous denial and an understandable despair at the Kafkaesque place in which they find themselves, serving an indefinite sentence for offences that they haven't yet committed and might never. And though Theroux properly pressed hard on the ugly nature of the crimes, he also let you see how creepy coercive psychotherapy can be.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

Louis Theroux: A Place for Paedophiles, BBC2
“Louis Theroux: A Place for Paedophiles took the earnest interviewer off to Coalinga, a secure treatment centre in the California wilderness. This bleak institution houses 800 men who have served sentences for sexual offences. [ ...] In the end, you couldn't help feeling some, most, maybe all of the men in Coalinga deserved to be there. There were reasons, though, behind all their sordid stories, and on this our presenter was strangely silent.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, BBC1
“Last night's closing episode [ ...] was slow, condescending and uninvolving, almost cold (an achievement given the climate). The actors with their funny walks and exaggerated facial gestures failed even to achieve the sentimentality that this tale of our heroine's engagement surely aspired to.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, BBC1
“A long-missing ingredient finally made the perfect episode of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, when the marriage plans of Precious Ramotswe (Jill Scott) were threatened by the reappearance of her violent, trumpet-playing husband. The tinge of nastiness, and real things being at stake, turned this show from a cartoon into a credible drama. Shame it was the last episode.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

Heartbeat, ITV1
“Tthe resumption of the penultimate season of Heartbeat, [ ...] demonstrated that this old warhorse knows how to hit its admittedly low targets of telling in 60 minutes a brace of stories well and warmly. It realises that without a compelling plot it is nothing. Its stars are the 1960s and Yorkshire and, rather remarkably, it fails to patronise either.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

Topics