TV Critics: Louis Theroux; Who Was Yehudi?; Hinterland

“Theroux wisely tones down his usual contrived faux-naive personality and plays things about as straight as he can manage. Maybe it won’t cure anyone, and maybe all it will do is confirm what you already know about a friend, loved one or acquaintance who is losing control, but the stories are informative as well as terrifying.”
Sean O’Grady, The Independent

“It is good to have Louis back here in Britain, and on a subject that feels close to home and relevant. Brilliant television – honest, brutal, numbing, sad.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“The programme was stronger on fly-on-the-wall observation than nuanced analysis of root causes. There was no room for discussion of the psychiatric support available to alcoholics. Theroux understood the limits of his function: to be a tourist in hell, an unthreatening presence as the camera gawped at the afflicted.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“This was a superficial, formulaic documentary that selected its targets and visited them once a week or so, for a month, like a health visitor dropping in to take blood samples. The one valuable insight the programme produced was that deeper mental illnesses often underlie alcohol addiction.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The least of the many shocking moments in this immersive documentary was when Theroux confessed that he might drink ‘a bottle and a half of wine or maybe two’ over an afternoon or evening or else four or five pints of lager. The film’s other stories suggested alcoholism was a disease to which certain personality types are particularly prone. I do not think Theroux fits them.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“As this moving and good-hearted film made clear, no committed alcoholic is really ever battling the demon drink. It’s their own demons they need to conquer.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Better than simply a trawl through his life, this shines a light into what his teacher Louis Persinger described as the ‘deep, mysterious and miraculous well’ of Yehudi’s genius, and at his idealism and humanitarian work.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“As a biographical portrait, this was a sprightly allegretto rather than a grand andante maestoso. If it didn’t fully answer the question in its title, that’s perhaps because nobody knows.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“Richard Harrington’s DCI Mathias remains hard to enjoy: a chippy, hip-jacketed Noel Edmonds with a beard to match who has not bothered to learn Welsh. Fortunately, it is not his psychological hinterland we watch for, but Wales’s physical one. Vast, poor and beautiful, it recalled on Saturday night nothing so much as the Washington of Twin Peaks.”
Andrew Billen, The Times