TV Critics: Dark Angel; Moonstone; Ice Train To Nowhere

“It shuttles as if on amphetamines between altar and graveyard somewhere in the North-East. Match, hatch, dispatch. Repeat after the commercial break. I won’t be coming back: Dark Angel is in too much of a tearing hurry to ask insightful questions about a grim reaper oop north.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“With Cotton’s babies and husbands dropping like flies, the misery was so pervasive (over any sense of suspense) that it became rather hard to take seriously. Joanne Froggatt did well with a difficult role.”
James Jackson, The Times

“I may not have the strength for part two, but I thoroughly enjoyed the first episode, though possibly not always as I was supposed to. A Halloween hoot.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“You could imagine historians such as Lucy Worsley or Mary Beard explaining her very well over on BBC2. As a drama on ITV, however, Cotton’s story was dull and repetitive.”
Daily Express

“All this was made more dour still by writer Gwyneth Hughes’s determination to pile on layers of feminist dogma. This is what Downton might have been like, if its creator Lord Julian Fellowes had been an Islington Leftie.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“A new version of Wilkie Collins’s proto-detective yarn The Moonstone is a welcome fillip. This charming Moonstone should prove a great gateway drug for crime drama, costume drama and for Collins himself.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“One slightly too obvious moment of Poldark-style torso-flashing aside, it’s a very decent take on the book which is often dubbed the first English-language detective novel, at once conjuring a nicely suspenseful atmosphere and maintaining a certain undemanding cosiness.”
Hugh Montgomery, The i

“Chris Tarrant chunters through his railway adventures like a common man’s Michael Portillo, turning his nose up at local delicacies. Eventually he arrived at his destination and didn’t even bother looking around. Some traveller.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The sense of remoteness was undone a little by Chinese tourists filming every snow-capped tree and a British TV presenter on their iPhones.”
Daily Express