TV Critics: Don't Panic: The Truth About Population; Bouncers; Bedlam

“Hans Rosling was an engaging host, who looked and sounded like a Fifties B-movie mad scientist, but had a good line in throwaway jokes… It was a wise and thoroughly informative programme, filled with surprising statistics, but mainly, it was an optimistic one… It’s rare and lovely to see a documentary that tells us not to panic, for once.”
Tom Chivers, The Telegraph

“Yes, Rosling is basically presenting statistical data, a series of graphs. But he does it so very well, tells it like a story, the story of everyone who ever lived, and who will ever live. An important story then.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“An excellent slide-show, except the slides were videos and the props were holograms of graphs and figures of which Jeremy Vine on election night might be envious… In television terms, Rosling’s spirited, funny performance was surely cause for optimism, heralding the return of the lecture as a valid factual form.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“At first glance, this looks like yet another of those depressing C4 documentaries about binge-drinking Brits causing carnage on the high street at the weekend. But actually there’s a bit more to it, because we go behind the hard (and the diplomatic) facades of these people and find not just a softer centre, but vulnerability and sadness.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“We’ve seen this before, in a million Brits-abroad or Essex-gone-wild-type documentaries, and the fact that we were seeing it through the eyes of the bouncers didn’t make it particularly fresh. That said, the strange, wild movements that drunken young Britons call ‘dancing’, when replayed in cold digital video, are always fascinating from an anthropological point of view. Future generations will look at them in bafflement and wonder.”
Tom Chivers, The Telegraph

“The bouncers generally came out looking very human but that might have been because the punters mostly behaved like animals.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Bedlam plunged us into the chaos of a triage ward, where patients in crisis spent a short time being assessed before the system decided what to do with them. As the department’s boss explained, big decisions were made there, not necessarily the kind of live/die dilemmas you see on Casualty but nevertheless ones with a profound impact on liberty and wellbeing.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The abiding image from last night’s episode of Bedlam was of two male patients sitting in a grey canteen striking up an impromptu duet of the Christmas carol ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. This took place in the South London and Maudsley crisis centre, the focus of this second episode, but also served as a visual metaphor for this mental health documentary series as a whole: determinedly optimistic, despite some very bleak circumstances.”
Ellen E Jones, The Independent

“The film’s director, Paddy Wivell, deserves a bonus for not running through any available doorway as Rupert, who was bipolar and had served time, approached in one of his rages.”
Andrew Billen, The Times