TV Critics: Mayday; Being Human; Story Of Music; Call The Midwife

“Brian Welsh’s direction of this first episode was virtuosic, creating a green and pleasant village where, nonetheless, everybody loathes their neighbours and hates their partners. Writers Ben Court and Caroline Ip very quickly set a complex network of relationships in motion and portrayed a village convincingly ill-at-ease with itself. Not so much broken Britain as recognisably prickly Britain.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“Mayday looks like being the darkest, thorniest, knottiest TV drama event of the year. It’s rather like Midsomer Murders might be, if Midsomer Murders was actually any good, that is: a pacy, engaging peek at the wildness within, of the evil lurking in the trees at the edge of every apparently idyllic little place.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Is Mayday not only the title of this week’s big stripped drama but a cry for help from its writers? The sheer number of characters in this story of a May queen who has disappeared from her bucolic, Home Counties town, and their general implausibility and unpleasantness, suggest that Ben Court and Caroline Ip may have ordered more than they can digest. I’ll give it a few more nights and get back to you.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“It sounds as programmatic as Death In Paradise, which I recently berated for its Cluedo plotting. And you could, theoretically at least, object to Mayday on similar grounds. The clues had a semaphored clarity of a creakier kind of drama. I found it trickier to do in practice though, because Mayday is less about who dun the crime than about what the crime does to the community.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Every time I watch, I find myself caring about the characters and relishing Toby Whithouse’s writing, which can do funny and heartfelt and wryly offhand with equal facility. It’s full of utterly impossible scenarios energised by credible (and recognisable) emotions.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It was one of those programmes doomed to make one angry by its omissions. There was one moment that worked for me, though – his bravura, counter-intuitive cut from Prokofiev’s music for Alexander Nevsky to Danny Elfman’s score for Batman. It underscored Goodall’s killer point: anybody who tells you classical music is dead just doesn’t go to the pictures.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

 “It was hard to enjoy this week’s Call the Midwife, which felt as if it had been made by the old GPO Film Unit to educate people about the dangers of racism. The one advantage of a story that thumped the anti-racism tub so loudly was that you could barely hear the excruciating dialogue. Doing this junior school take on Fifties racism insults the people who suffered it, and ignores the subtle ways it continues to operate in our society.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express