“This was eyeballs-glued-to-the-screen fascinating.”
“24 Hours in A&E was fabulous television; this is better. A hospital – and A&E especially, as it’s as much about the people themselves as what’s wrong with them – is a fascinating place, because lives can be changed so dramatically there. A police station has all that too, but also the extra irresistible allure of crime. Fictional TV drama knows that already. There are plenty of hospital dramas, but loads more cop shows. The only other institutions that come any where near, in the fascination stakes, are schools and prisons.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian
“It’s difficult to watch Channel 4’s new series 24 Hours in Police Custody and not think of all the cop shows – the US imports, the Nordic noirs and the home-grown police procedurals – which make up our daily diet of drama. This, we’re told, is what police work is really like – no scripted pay-off lines, no suspiciously good-looking district attorneys and not a wooly jumper in sight. And yet, there is still plenty of drama to be found in Luton Police Station. This was eyeballs-glued-to-the-screen fascinating.”
Ellen E Jones, The Independent
“As documentary cameras went behind the scenes at a Luton police station, this was possibly the best comedy-drama I’ve seen all year, meriting its feature-length slot with surprises and punchlines- intense interrogations and rubber chickens - to the very end.”
Alex Hardy, The Times
“This was extraordinary, smartly edited, edge-of-the-sofa television. Who needs fiction when fact is this compelling?”
Michael Hogan, The Telegraph
“Try as I might, I can’t remember a single characteristic of Oliver Twist. He was just an orphan to whom things just happened. Same for Nicholas Nickleby. It was somewhat the same with Cilla. As played by Smith, she was vulnerable, decent with a touch of the divas and above all else a talented singer.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express
“It seemed that Jeff Pope’s drama might be mere hagiography, crystallising Cilla Black’s ‘national treasure status’ by showing her as sweet and funny, a bit gauche. Sheridan Smith’s performance, rather like Cilla’s big ballads, yanked at the heartstrings, giving her an unfaltering humanity that seemed a little unreal.”
Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph
Horizon: Is Your Brain Male or Female? BBC2
“It was a fascinating film but frustratingly ambiguous in its findings. Both sides of the debate were given equal weight. Mosley and Roberts drew different conclusions from the same evidence, meaning they disagreed at the start and still disagreed at the end. Maybe that’s fine and wanting firmer conclusions is just my brain being male. Pass the toy digger.”
Michael Hogan, The Telegraph
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