TV Critics: Amazing Greys; The Guess List; Dirty Weekenders in France; The Crimson Field

“At a time when the Treasury treats pensioners so badly that you wouldn’t put it past them to deploy G4S goons to terminate bus-pass holders over 60 as part of new cost-saving parameters, how refreshing to see a programme showing that older people rule.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“Amazing Greys is based on the moronic cult of youth, the assumption that younger is always better. All the facts and statistics tell us that just isn’t true: it’s the young who get into fights, crash their cars, take out crippling loans and behave like louts.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Say what you like about Rob Brydon but he hosts a brain-ruining celebrity quiz show with aplomb. How bad is The Guess List? It makes Would I Lie to You? seem like a work of shattering genius.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“Brydon has a surprisingly rare, but commercially valuable, ability to be both granny-friendly and genuinely funny. So it’s understandable that the producers have based their new show entirely around his sparkling personality, but it does make the quiz show element more pointless than Pointless.”
Ellen E Jones, The Independent

“Say what you like about Richard E Grant, but everyone’s third favourite thespy boomer (after Callow and Blessed) was expendable on Dirty Weekenders in France. What was Grant’s role? To do the voiceover and troll genially around French towns, telling us stuff we already know.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“The programme didn’t have much to it. There was no storyline, no purpose — it was just a luvvie in a tight leather jacket and a voluminous scarf wrapped around his neck like an anaconda encircling a tree trunk. But at least it wasn’t presented by some brash, immature twerp with no clue and an excess of enthusiasm.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“This was actually two programmes in one. The first, a travelogue, hosted by the Withnail and I star in which he indulged his taste for antiques by rummaging around markets in Provence… The other was a more serious documentary about how professional collectors like Stuart Patterson and Matt Black make their living.”
Ellen E Jones, The Independent

“I can’t help feel the series is unable to decide exactly what it wants to be. It’s not an amusing Downton romp, but it lacks the emotional pull of the BBC’s other forays into the same period.”
Rose Troup Buchanan, The Independent

“As one of the marquee productions of the Corporation’s year-long commemoration of the start of the First World War, it feels lacking in realism and gravitas. I expected better.”
Chris Harvey, The Telegraph