TV Critics: Nick and Margaret: We Pay All Your Benefits, Brady and Hindley: Possession

“Some people, of course, are so famous that they require no surnames. Thanks to the success of The Apprentice, Nick and Margaret (Hewer and Mountford respectively, just in case you are amnesiac or have recently started a cerebellar decontamination programme and scrubbed out whichever of the rank oubliettes of memory it is that persists in taking up good storage space with the names of past Big Brother winners, Hawaii 5-0’s theme music and a list of Alyssa Milano’s career highlights) have become the Prince and Madonna de nos jours.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“It was an intelligent attempt to go behind the headlines, and went some way towards cutting thought the misunderstanding that often surrounds the issue. One flaw, however, was that we weren’t told the key statistic – that only around 10 per cent of the welfare budget goes towards the unemployed – until halfway through. Why it was fronted by Nick and Margaret (now so famous in their own right they don’t need surnames) never quite became clear, either. But, with their bizarre outfits and lovable gusto, they brought curiosity and enthusiasm to what could otherwise have been pretty flat. “We’re the explorers!” declared Nick in one scene. Margaret gave him a withering look.”
Sarah Rainey, The Telegraph

“The benefits world is not something I know anything about,” said Margaret Mountford at the beginning of Nick and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits. It was an odd thing for the presenter of a programme about the welfare system to boast about, but then it dawned on you that this candid admission of ignorance actually was a credential.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Someone, somewhere had noticed the ghost of a chance of a scintilla of a shadow of a possibility that there was something new to say about the Moors murders. They had used that as a spurious excuse to assemble the last shreds of the victims’ for ever-shattered families, a couple of the police and reporters involved at the time, a then-child neighbour of Brady and Hindley willing to talk on camera for the first time about the Moors outings they took her on, and a consultant psychologist who saidthings like “Ian Brady is a full-on psychopath” and fashion them into Brady and Hindley: Possession.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“I do hope that Ian Brady wasn’t able to watch Brady and Hindley: Possession, a mysteriously pointless rehash of the Moors murders, given a frisson of exclusivity by the inclusion of audio tapes of Myra Hindley, delivering her own account of some of the crimes.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent