TV Critics: Boss; Home Delivery; The Baby Bomb; Horizon; Prisoners’ Wives; Who Killed My Dad?

“There’s no doubt that Boss is beautifully made. Kelsey Grammer is brilliantly powerful yet malevolent as mayor Tom Kane… It’s all marvellously put together, but there’s something missing… By the end I realised that watching Boss is like talking to a really good-looking, but oddly charisma-free, person at a party. You can see they are captivating, they are textbook beautiful, they have all the right bits in the right places – and some of those bits are pretty impressive – but, somehow, they don’t have the extra chemistry that makes your heart leap.”
Terry Ramsey, The Telegraph

“You’d be hard pressed to argue that Boss is startlingly original in its content… But Kelsey Grammer unquestionably earned his 2012 Golden Globe Best Actor award, if only for the steely efficiency with which he kills off any lingering memory of Frasier and buries the bones where they can’t be found.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“The plotting is intricate and compulsive in its every strand. The acting is ingenious, the dialogue fast and profane. A cross between The West Wing and The Sopranos, Boss is stylishly directed by Gus Van Sant.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“TV executives are simple souls…They notice that another channel has had a hit with a programme about midwives so they think ‘We must have a programme about midwives, too’ and before you know it, midwives are popping up all over the schedules… Home Delivery was a workmanlike documentary that gave us glimpses into home births but really added little to our total knowledge of midwifery. But there is bound to be more midwife-themed programming. Keep your eyes peeled for ‘The Midwife Factor’ or ‘I’m a Midwife… Get Me Out of Here’”
Terry Ramsey, The Telegraph

“Every time – literally every time – you switch on the television these days, some poor woman in a strange position is yelling out in pain while a cheery midwife announces that she can see the head… It’s eight-year-old Dylan I feel most sorry for… I’m not sure any child should have to deal with even the thought of their mum’s involuntary poo and fishing for it using a sieve.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Here we go again: more howling, another home birth, in the paddling pool, on TV… Enough already.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Fong looks at how surgery has learned from other professions that involve making decisions in high-stress, high-risk, fast-moving situations – firefighting, flying planes and, perhaps most interestingly, Formula One pit crews… The guy doing the fuel is the anaesthetist, the lollypop man is the top surgeon in overall charge, the ones who roll the old tyres away the nurses … perhaps the analogy isn’t perfect. But anyway, the protocol this dude at Great Ormond Street designed was inspired by watching F1 pit crews, and children’s lives have been saved because of it. Isn’t that brilliant, and amazing?”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Technically, it was about hierarchy gradients, situational awareness and error cascades. But really it was about how even the most highly trained brains can choke in an emergency. A bit of humility and a simple checklist were the antidotes. If you can kill people with a bad day at work, you should put the iPlayer version on your to-do list.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“There’s something about women and prisons that brings out the worst in females and the best in drama. Terrific stuff.”
Virginia Blackburn, Daily Express

“The documentary made omissions: there was no explanation for Lloyd’s widow’s non-appearance; its interest in the deaths of Lloyd’s hired colleagues, Hussein Osman and Fred Nérac, cursory. But as an example of the conflict between the comforting and perhaps necessary myth of the fog of war and journalistic endeavor, it was impressive and moving.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“This was a fascinating documentary and one that, even in these knowing times, still had the power to deliver a visceral shock.”
Virginia Blackburn, Daily Express