TV Critics: If Memory Serves Me Right; Could We Survive a Mega-Tsunami?; Brushing Up On...; Hemlock Grove; Hey Diddly Dee

“One of those documentaries that involves a non-expert celebrity going on a journey of discovery triggered partly by events in their own lives. You know the ones… There’s a bit of science, a bit of psychology, a bit of Paul McKenna, quite a lot of blah. She’s amiable company, but the film is meandering, inconclusive, unmemorable.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“If you were looking for a detailed account of the mechanisms of memory you would have been out of luck. There was a bit of desultory talk about the hippocampus and the amygdala, and one of those obligatory visits to a CAT scanner so that Lipman could see her memories lighting up as little pixels. But ‘an echo of the past reverberating in your head’ was about as good as it got in terms of explanation, and that isn’t an explanation at all, frankly, just a poetic paraphrase.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“If form reflects content, this programme was a walk down the memory lane of memory programmes past: MRI scans of brains ‘lighting up’, Terry Pratchett and the theory that we cannot make memories until we can form sentences. Yet it had some wonderful moments, such as the revelation that Paul McKenna had hypnotised Lipman not to cry when talking about her late husband Jack Rosenthal’s memoirs on a book tour. This was a feat. I once interviewed her and she wept as she talked about her mother, who wasn’t even dead.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Lipman’s soft, funny exterior conceals a razor-sharp mind. Blessed with a warm, sing-song voice and big, brown, slightly mischievous eyes she took the viewer by the hand and led them gently into the nightmarish realm of memory loss.”
Bernadette McNulty, The Telegraph

“It steered a middle course between sounding like CBeebies and making our brains hurt. Perhaps some viewers might have felt it was a confused film, neither entirely about people nor focused enough on neuroscience. That, for me, was its strength.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“There’s going to be a volcanic eruption and half of La Palma, one of the Canary islands, is going to slide into the sea. No great shame, you might think, but this will unleash a massive CGI wave three times the height of the Shard that will take out New York just like in The Day After Tomorrow, though less convincingly because this CGI wave doesn’t have a Hollywood budget behind it.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Could We Survive a Mega-Tsunami? No, don’t be bloody daft, of course we couldn’t. In fact, I barely survived the film, a silly scientific disaster movie based on the fact that half of La Palma may slide into the Atlantic ocean at some point in the future, wiping out much of the Eastern seaboard of the United States. If it’s going to happen you have better things to do with the time remaining than watch this.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“The objective of this imagined staging of a super wave hitting Europe and America appeared to be the creation of enough fear to have paranoid survivalists fleeing up the nearest mountain to barricade themselves in. What else was this Hollywood-style, CGI-heavy bad dream with hysterical voice-over and tribal wailing trying to achieve? Worse, was the conclusion to this hysterical piece of science fantasy: as Japan showed us, you couldn’t do anything to prepare for a tsunami anyway. This was a frightening vision I’d sooner forget.”
Bernadette McNulty, The Telegraph

“Brushing Up On… British Tunnels released Danny Baker into the BBC archives to do what he does best, stringing together curiosities and oddities with verbally ornate jocularity. To be honest, I didn’t find it quite as funny as various sources had promised, but Baker’s manner is very engaging.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Brushing Up On… marries a witty voiceover to an award-winning collection of obscure archive footage.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“It’s as if there’s a fire hydrant on Baker’s forehead, it’s turned on full, connected to a high pressure hose and aimed at you, and you’re being splurt-blasted by his words and wit and wisdom.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“So is Hemlock Grove another triumph for the TV and film streaming site? The short answer is no. Quite the reverse in fact. Hoping to be a cross between Twin Peaks and True Blood, with a hint of E4’s soapy thriller Revenge thrown in for good measure, this sexed-up 13-part series, I’m afraid, is Netflix’s first dud. Where it tries so desperately to be eerie and esoteric, it winds up as derivative as anything the basic TV channels churn out on a regular basis: hammy, hackneyed and disjointed.”
Patrick Smith, The Telegraph

“Written and directed by Marc Warren and featuring, somehow, Kylie Minogue, it was an amusing but actorish 30 minutes. We are all, it concluded punningly, made from the dust of an exploding distant star. Speak for yourselves, luvvies.”
Andrew Billen, The Times