TV Critics: How to Get to Heaven With the Hutterites; Heritage!; Mayday; Gogglebox

“It was a beautiful, moving film but it was hard not to feel that you had seen most, if not all of it, before. The questions of how much harm and good this kind of religious life can bring its followers, or whether you can ever be said to have chosen something without knowing what else there is to be chosen from, were the same and moved no further than usual.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“It felt like we’d seen the show, a one-off from British producer Lynn Alleway, before. Although different, the Hutterites share traits with the Amish (old-fashioned clothing, traditional gender roles) and the programme relied more on cutaways of rolling hills than gripping new content… Peppered with awkward silences and monosyllabic interviewees, this was more freak show than fascinating.”
Sarah Rainey, The Telegraph

“Director Lynn Alleway’s gently persistent questioning of her interviewees extracted every fact you could want but not a single original idea… They all thought alike… Then, suddenly, things began to fracture… To Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, Kelly had delivered himself from the sect that promised deliverance. Finally, Alleway delivered too.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Lynne Alleway’s film revealed a group pleased with its isolation… Yet in this documentary we met young people who’d either fled their communities or were itching to do so… I’d feel the grave closing in on me if I was photographer Kelly or would-be architect Waylon, living out each day knowing that I’d never be allowed to fulfill my potential by a community that claimed to value and need me.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“I reckon Heritage! The Battle for Britain’s Past is one of the most important BBC offerings of the year… Stirring music, picturesque images of sunny countryside and an impressive selection of engaging historians made for easy-to-follow, informative TV… There weren’t quite enough shots of grand country mansions for my liking, and some of the scenes were a little forced… But Heritage! certainly gave pause for thought.”
Sarah Rainey, The Telegraph

“From one angle, Heritage! The Battle For Britain’s Past was a rather odd thing – a triumphant tale of government infringement of civil liberties cherished since Magna Carta… It was a tale of aristocratic and moneyed activists busying themselves on behalf of the common good… One can’t help feeling that the middle classes ended up as disproportionate beneficiaries of the heritage brigades’ efforts.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It was a brisk, bracing tour – as comprehensive and comprehensible as you could possibly wish – of the evolution of the ideology surrounding the conservation and preservation of our (built) environment… It was narrated so unabashedly fruitily by Sian Phillips that I am applying to have her voice added to the Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“The originality of this piece was to its credit. It was a crime story that for once did not star the inspector who came to call… Aidan Gillen generated effortless menace, Lesley Manville was a joy and some scenes, such as her dealings with the undertaker, were unexpectedly funny. But as the overuse of the spooky music testified, Mayday was too self-conscious of its pagan mythologising. It wasn’t actually scary. It was fey.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“A bizarrely solipsistic exercise in which Channel 4 films people gawping at television programmes and then turns it into a telly programme for people to gawp at… Anyone with a Twitter account could predict roughly what you would get, which is a cocktail of prejudice and wisecracks. Whether it has any future, I honestly couldn’t say.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent