TV Critics: David Walliams: Snapshot in Time; The Most Dangerous Man in Tudor England

“There’s a good idea at the heart of David Walliams: Snapshot in Time. Unfortunately, it’s a good idea for a 20-minute programme and ITV had actually given it an hour… It’s very difficult to structure a programme that consists of a series of mild anti-climaxes followed by a bigger one. The eventual reconstruction of the photograph offers no revelation at all, just a reasonable excuse for everybody to stop the reminiscing and go home again.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It is a lovely idea, recreating this pivotal point in his life. But you’d hope that it would be a big Friends Reunited moment, old memories and secrets flooding back… There’s very little of that though, and they weren’t actually friends… Even David seems slightly underwhelmed by the whole thing.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“This was no celebration of boyhood friendship (he clearly didn’t like the other boys very much). No. It was a vehicle of homage to Walliams… How cringeworthy to watch Walliams forcing person after person to celebrate his greatness!… I would strongly suggest that you only watch this if you happen to be David Walliams.”
Jake Wallis Simons, The Telegraph

“This documentary stood head and shoulders above the cataract of other programmes about the Tudors that have flooded our screens recently. OK, it had the hammy music and hyperbolic claims that have become obligatory in these days of entertainment saturation. OK, it had animated scenes of London superimposed upon the pages of a Bible. But these niggles were eclipsed by Melvyn Bragg’s impressive scholarship and agile mind, which shone like beacons from under his coiffed locks; as did his passion for the material, which flashed with every sentence like the teeth white in his mouth.”
Jake Wallis Simons, The Telegraph

“Bragg’s claim for Tyndale – that he was one of the co-creators of the English language alongside that more famous Tudor genius Shakespeare – sounded overreaching at the beginning but nothing less than a statement of the obvious by the end of Anna Cox’s film… The pictures weren’t that much of a nuisance either; they included some very lovely atmospherics from the cameraman, Ian Salvage, who’d managed to make industrial Antwerp look beautifully bleak. But it did make you wonder about the business of illustrating programmes in which the most captivating material is intellectual.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent