TV Critics: Children on the Frontline; Britain’s Oldest Family Businesses

“Children on the Frontline was photojournalist Marcel Mettelsiefen’s long-form documentary debut, but you would never have guessed. It was a masterful assembling of bleak and awful facts and compelling stories. As the hour unfolded, it felt as if you were watching a sculptor at work.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“As the children skipped through bombed-out houses and peeped through blast-holes in walls, I was reminded of John Boorman’s superb film Hope & Glory, about his own adventures as a London schoolboy during the Blitz. But things, understandably, grew darker. A bleak but insightful film.”
Michael Hogan, The Telegraph

“You will not see stranger or more upsetting images this year than the footage of Farah and her five-year-old sister, Sara, exploring a neighbour’s bomb-shattered home.Thank God our children don’t have to endure what Abu Ali’s family are suffering.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Farah chatted away happily about collecting shrapnel as if she were recalling trips to the park to feed the ducks. There were no trips to the park now, of course. Indeed there was very little of the old life the youngsters once enjoyed.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Perhaps the most touching scene in the stunning documentary Children On the Frontline was when five-year-old Sara contracted a fever. Her parents, Abu and Hala, poured her on to a sofa to sleep it off. It was the one normal moment we had witnessed in her childhood.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

Click to read our blog from ITN Productions’ Chris Shaw

“We followed Fiona Toye from the East End to the National Archives via the National Military Museum, learning the history of her firm. Fascinating for her no doubt, but sadly, even as a viewer with a cavernous appetite for niche BBC4 documentaries, a bit dry for the rest of.”
Will Dean, The Independent

“Family tradition was dying hard at Toye & Co, a regalia firm that not only makes the medals and ribbons for OBE insignia but the peaked caps of Orient Express guards and the embroidered cushions on Kremlin seats. ‘It’s akin to a stately home: a stately factory,’ said Fiona Toye. Such notions are sadly outmoded in Benefits Street Britain.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The efforts of Fiona Toye to trace the founding ancestors of her thriving business told a far wider story.  As the Industrial Revolution kicked off, an emerging, newly wealthy middle class looked for ways to demonstrate its power and status. Of course, the more exalted the society, the more ribbons, tassels and buttons were required to demonstrate your status.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express