TV Critics: Flights and Fights; Bi-Curious Me; First Dates; The Girl With 7 Mums; The Good Wife

“There were more hard lessons on business in this documentary’s pithy interviews with O’Leary, Haji-Ioannou, senior executives and harried stewards than a whole series of bluster on The Apprentice… This enjoyable, catty, informative programme did a deft job capturing the mixed blessings of the phenomenon.”
Ceri Radford, The Telegraph

“Flights and Fights didn’t delve very deep beneath the surface of the industry. It would have been nice to get a little more, for instance, about the tricky relationship between easyJet’s biggest shareholder, a bouncy Greek self-publicist called Stelios, and the current chief executive Carolyn McCall… But it was still interesting to get a little of the history of these businesses, which have successfully purged every last vestige of glamour that commercial air travel possessed.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“According to Flights and Fights, the BBC’s Watchdog receives a complaint a day about about Ryanair, mainly over its add-on fees. Yet [boss Michael O’Leary] relishes his appearances, using them to announce spurious plans to charge for loo use and overweight passengers… My money is on O’Leary emerging as the eventual champion in this flight fight.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“A programme going into great detail about Ryanair and easyJet would not on first glance seem to contain that many giggles per minute. Yet if you’ve ever flown on a budget airline you’ll know that laughing is often the best way to get through it.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The film achieved the paradoxical trick of being simultaneously naive (Gosh! Some girls snog girls!) and cynical – prurience as social anthropology. I guess it will have found an appreciative audience among the mono-curious – heterosexual men fascinated by what they can’t have.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Bi-Curious Me was a flimsy, titillating look at modern sexual mores… No amount of shimmying burlesque dancers could liven up what was essentially dull television… Moving documentaries can be woven from the complex fibres of modern relationships – as anything from BBC Two’s Wonderland series testifies – but this was not one of them.”
Ceri Radford, The Telegraph

 “If this dreary film was meant to be an advert for bisexuality it failed… The sample size was too small for any of this to mean anything except that it has never been so on-trend to make documentaries about bisexuals.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“The First Dates recipe is simple. Take one restaurant, six Saturday evenings, two giant handfuls of single people looking for love, mix together, add alcohol and serve to a salivating public. You couldn’t have dragged me away.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Having multiple parents like Ellie Sharp didn’t seem to do much harm… Most children of 10 long for independence and consider their families a bit weird at times but few express those ideas so well and with such maturity and fair-mindedness as young Ellie.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“There hasn’t been a female lead shown juggling the demands of work and home more realistically or with such empathy since Mary Beth in Cagney & Lacey.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian