“Silly, this certainly was. And probably pointless, too. But you couldn’t help thinking that Robot Wars’ time has finally come.”

ROBOT-WARS

Robot Wars, BBC2

“The presenters Dara Ó Briain and Angela Scanlon did their best to crank up the drama, but for me the problem was one of scale. The robots seemed quite big when their creators were being interviewed, but in the state-of-the-art fighting arena they looked to me tiny, like children’s toys. Still, I enjoyed the moment when Ó Briain asked one man, quite reasonably, if his robot, Kill-E-Krank-E, was named after Janette Krankie. “No,” he bridled, looking genuinely offended. Yes, let’s have more of this.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Instead of the lumbering gladiatorial contest of old, all hell broke loose instantly as the newly agile machines went at it ferociously – knocking seven bells
out of each other in genuinely entertaining, almost athletic, fashion…Silly, this certainly was. And probably pointless, too. But you couldn’t help thinking that Robot Wars’ time has finally come.”
Gerard O’Donovan, The Telegraph

Keith Richards: The Origin of the Species, BBC2

“Julien Temple’s film, The Origin of the Species, was concerned not with the Keith we know from headlines, but the Keith we don’t know from his days as a Dartford schoolboy in the Forties and Fifties, long before his rock’n’roll drugg excesses earned him the nickname the Human Laboratory. It was a good decision. All that other stuff has been flogged to death anyway and, in focusing on the unexceptional, Temple managed to make something new and quietly exceptional.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“[A] masterly and intimate portrait of the pre-Stones years”
Tim Lusher, The Guardian

The Marvellous World of Roald Dahl, BBC2

“As much as a portrait of the late, great Dahl, this was a portrait of writing itself.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

The Secret Agent, BBC1

“It could have been the climax to a lesser drama. But with another full hour to go, the one thing that seems guaranteed by the Secret Agent is an even murkier – and perhaps still more affecting – trawl through a dark night of the human soul that, despite being dressed up in Victorian garb, feels wholly
relevant to right now.”
Gerard O’Donovan, The Telegraph

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