TV Critics: Ramsay's Hotel Hell; Freud: Genius of the Modern World

“I doubt many viewers would have cared about the near death of the hotel. Many would certainly have concluded that Ramsay was ill qualified to act as a family therapist. Featuring this family at all – even though the programme ended with the traditional moist smiles – was, I think, a mistake.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“You spend your whole time waiting for a reveal that never comes. What isn’t covered is far more compelling than what is”
Stephen Moss, The Guardian

“The episode had the sort of in-the-bones gloom you normally only find in Russian novels, except of course that this was real suffering for real people. Gordon, in a manner we might politely call “no nonsense”, got the place up to scratch again. I’d like to think that helped. But not as much as flogging the place and moving to California might.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The transformation in both Dede and Dave was remarkable as they emerged all stunned smiles. You had to wonder whether he didn’t have a team of therapists hiding somewhere in the shadows. Then, as always, Ramsay did the only thing he could to preserve the new air of positivity: he got the hell out.”
Gerard O’Donovan, The Telegraph

“She was in particularly sceptical mood in her concluding episode on Sigmund Freud, whom she more or less concluded, having put his childhood on the couch, was less a scientist than, in his own mind at least, a romantic hero on the Greek model.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Repression, wish fulfilment, penis envy, the pleasure principle, the Oedipus complex, Freudian slips, it was all here. So why did this exploration of the unconscious mind – Freud’s Big Idea – send me to sleep?”
Stephen Moss, The Guardian