TV Critics: DCI Banks; Welcome to India; Great British Food Revival

“It’s not exactly The Killing, but DCI Banks is sturdily and efficiently plotted. There is, however, some shockingly cliched dialogue… [But] it’s a promising return, and if the dialogue gets to you, you can always imagine they’re speaking Danish.”
Tim Dowling, The Guardian

“Our preconceptions are twice challenged, once when an interviewee presumes to consider Helen ‘wholesome’ and once in a magnificent speech by Banks when he presents, and then withdraws, an instant pop-psychology sketch of his new sidekick. Some really superior writing is going on here.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“It was a clever re-weave of those old police show staples: the good cop wrongly accused, the chalk-and-cheese duo who get off on the wrong foot, or the right foot from the audience’s point of view. However things work out, you couldn’t call this Bank boring.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“In DCI Banks, Stephen Tompkinson plays pretty much to type – that is, he looks cross, or exasperated or as if he’s suffering from a nasty case of heartburn, according to what variety of weltschmerz the scene requires. Caroline Catz plays against type as a control-freak DI who snaps at her underlings and gets tetchy when rules are broken. Impressively, you almost forget how gorgeous she is. The drama itself fills the gap between 9pm and 10pm almost exactly.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“The films depict life in the slums of Mumbai and Kolkata and seem determined to present this often desperate and hand-to-mouth existence as an exemplary triumph of the human spirit, rather than an instance of social injustice. It employs a third-person plural voice that falsely enlists everyone in the same act of willed chirpiness. ‘Over one in six of the world live here,’ said the voiceover at the beginning, ‘and you know what? We are thriving on it.’ Define ‘we’ and define ‘thriving’, I thought sardonically.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“I loved Will Anderson’s Welcome to Lagos two years ago. Tom Beard’s series Welcome to India promotes a similar vision of the subcontinent. In some ways it may even be better… A bad mistake has been made in post-production, however. In an effort not to patronise its subjects, the series is narrated in an Indian accent with many references to ‘we’ and ‘us’, as in ‘And you know what? We are thriving on it.’ The voiceover is actually by Stockport-born Sacha Dhawan and – you know what? – in real life the actor speaks as if he lives upstairs at Downton Abbey.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“I like watercress, but I bristle at seeing it portrayed as the red squirrel of salad leaves. Apparently we used to eat 10,000 tonnes a year, and now it’s more like 2,000. I suppose I could take on a few more bowls of watercress soup over a year, but I’m not upping my consumption fivefold. Not for anybody.”
Tim Dowling, The Guardian