TV Critics: Complicit; The Hotel

“Complicit is a classy piece of work, a tense, stifling, understated, intelligent thriller, beautifully performed, beautifully crafted and beautiful to look at. It also asks questions about whether it’s sometimes OK to do something bad in order to prevent something worse happening. In other words: is torture ever justified? This is not a world of good guys and bad guys, right and wrong, black and white; it’s a more difficult place. Again, it feels like the real world. And this feels like television for now.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“The strength of Hibbert’s piece was the way in which it acknowledged that the security services can’t win either way… Where 24 repeatedly presented viewers with torture as a heroic shortcut, this showed it as a potential snare, and one that fanatical men know how to use… Hibbert’s drama was about uncertainty, and perhaps the best thing about it was that it will have left viewers uncertain and unsatisfied themselves.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It was the most tentative, particular, sometimes wilfully boring edge-of-the-seat drama I have seen in a long while… If Spooks was an all-action theme park ride through surveillance and counter terrorism, Complicit set out to explain that it was also total phooey.”
Mark Monahan, The Telegraph

“The film was slow, because surveillance is slow, but we went at its pace because David Oyelowo’s portrayal of Edward kept us moving… Edward, in contrast, was a dull maverick, which made Oyelowo’s interesting performance rather remarkable… Much was pitch-perfect: the office politics, the hopelessness of Egypt, the frustrated one-to-one scenes between Oyelowo and Arsher Ali, who played the weasily Ahmed… It opened the imaginative retina, not only to the arguments around torture but to the dulling practicalities of espionage.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“I could have done without the modern, Scandacrime-style directing, with three main features seeming to be silences, even longer silences and strip lighting. It was still a brilliant bit of TV storytelling though: subtle, thoughtful and grown-up.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“A black rhino, star of Flight of the Rhino: Natural World, is not an uncomical creature even in normal circumstances. A combination of anger and confusion and momentum, there’s something of Wayne Rooney about one.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“It all seemed 100 per cent honest, 110 per cent moving and sad and yet the plinky-plonk soundtrack kept on taking the mickey. Many a business is sabotaged by its owners, of course, and I don’t know if this would be a fair verdict on Mark. The TV show he took part in certainly sabotaged itself.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express