“A dog's dinner of a format.” Read on for the full verdict on last night's TV.

Extreme Male Beauty, C4
“His [Tim Shaw] shallow investigation was full of obvious observations and endless sniggering shots of flabby folds and naughty bits. Given the predominance of TV documentaries about female body issues, you could perhaps celebrate this as a welcome take on the subject from a male perspective but the programme is a mess, a higgledy-piggledy clash of stolen formats. When clumsily cobbled together, it seemed more like an extended trailer for a programme that never arrived.”
Paul Whitelaw, The Scotsman

Extreme Male Beauty, C4
“Extreme Male Beauty is a dog's dinner of a format. They've just thrown everything at it ... There are too many men, too many formats. It's Men Years Younger, Gok for Guys, Britain's Next Top Male Model, Loose Men, Pecs in the City, Pimp My Arse, and anything else you can think of. And obviously it needs Extreme in the title, because that makes it better.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

Keeping it in the Family, BBC2
“Essentially Faking It with a gene transplant.”
Paul Whitelaw, The Scotsman

Keep it in the Family, BBC2
“Another example of television's obsession with format. You can't just have a nice film about an auction house in Leeds that has been in the same family for three generations, and may or may not be taken over by a member of the fourth generation. The story has to be shoehorned into a reality format, even if it doesn't really fit.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

Cutting Edge: Madeleine was Here, C4
“The dripfeed of information (like the new suspect) and access to the McCanns is controlled by the family and their press representative Clarence Mitchell. The journalism of the Cutting Edge documentary was thus skewed to whatever the McCann's agenda was. It was hard to see what material Cutting Edge had uncovered itself: it seemed to just record whatever the McCanns wanted us to see.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

ER, More 4
“It wasn't as grandstanding as it might have been, but it was good to have Carter alive, and Doug and Carol snug and loved-up in bed, at the end.”
Tim Teeman, The Times

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