TV Critics: Shetland; Countryfile; Toughest Place to Be A…; Call the Midwife; Secrets of Stonehenge Skeletons

“The two-part split left Sunday night’s episode with a lot of heavy lifting to do setting up tonight’s finale. Between a death in the first three minutes and another in the last, the exposition came thick and not especially fast, but there were enough hints of drama to come to ensure that those of us who stuck with it will tune in for the second half.”
Tom Meltzer, The Guardian

“When I saw the publicity for this cop show featuring Douglas Henshaw as a widowed Lerwick-based detective with a teenage stepdaughter, I groaned. I could imagine it all: his battle with the whiskey bottle, her anger at him, assorted, beetle-browed Sheltie ‘characters’ with about as much dimension as a shopping list on the back of a beermat.

I was delighted to be wrong… Instead of being the sort of 24-hours-before-the-psycho-killer-strikes-again codswallop that would work just as well, or poorly, in Los Angeles, or Laos, the plot of the first mystery is rooted in the islands and their unique history.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The piece has a bleak Nordic freshness but the plot, from Ann Cleeves’s novel Red Bones, feels as if it might have been dug up itself.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Plot points just popped up like ducks at a fairground shoot, with no teasing intrigue or twisty developments… The result was a programme that was certainly not especially good, and also not especially bad, but just pervasively dull.”
Neil Midgley, The Telegraph

“Charles seems to understand that being regally blokey is what will render the homilies about organic farming and the countryside palatable to a wider audience. Countryfile knows the part it has to play in fostering this illusion… It’s not the Prince’s fault that he lowers broadcasters’ IQs simply by appearing in front of them. And you can’t really blame him either for the dullness of this special edition of the programme.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“The Prince of Wales’s chuckling, no-nonsense approach stood in stark contrast to the four Countryfile presenters. Matt Baker, Julia Bradbury, Adam Henson and John Craven were falling over themselves to offer obeisance (though Baker could have displayed more manners if he’d bothered to shave). They took turns chatting to Prince Charles, with slightly uneven results, and then went off filming about topics close to the Prince’s heart. No doubt the Prince’s PR team hoped that these packaged inserts would improve his image in the minds of the viewing public.”
Neil Midgley, The Telegraph

“I was expecting a gruelling hour of machismo and superfluous adverbs, and was delighted to be proved quite wrong. What I got instead was a narrativised man-on-a-mission documentary that managed to smuggle in a sizable chunk of insight into life in one of the busiest cities in the world… When it chose to show us more of Mumbai than the view from a cockney’s cab, this disguised documentary was ‘seriously’ interesting.”
Tom Meltzer, The Guardian

“Call the Midwife would be the essence of Sunday night cosiness if only placental abbruptions and other birthing horrors did not keep occurring. Last night’s second-series finale was sentimental all right, but it demonstrated the carefulness of Heidi Thomas’s writing.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“It’s rare that you can ever describe the science of old bones as thrilling but this programme came close.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express