TV Critics: The Fall; Castles; The Railway

“Even without the crime thriller’s favourite plot device, The Fall has kept us gripped, not only for the entire first series, but now also for most of a second series, too. In some scenes, the pace is reflective, even leisurely, but it’s never long before another heart-thumping sequence kicks into gear.”
Ellen E jones, The Independent

“In the first series there was a clear sense of two dangerous imaginations at play: writer Alan Cubitt’s and Dutch director Jakob Verbruggen’s. It was the latter who gave the series its dark sheen and the troublingly glossy images connecting sex and the murder of women, but he also made it genuinely frightening. This series has not been that, not yet.”
Chris Harvey, The Telegraph

“The Fall is a porn movie with an A-level in psychology. It’s a sadistic fantasy that enlists us as complicit voyeurs, and anyone who pretends it’s just escapist drama is lying to themselves. In a word, it is vile.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“A colleague complained to me the other day that the problem with this season of The Fall is that it has not been horrible enough. It is true that there have, so far, been no new killings and therefore no fetishistic crime scenes. Cubitt has, however, not missed a trick when it comes to freaking us out with his analysis of the human imagination.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“By the time we left Dr Sam Willis at Kenilworth where Henry III had just won a pyrrhic victory after a 172-day long siege, he had built a solid edifice out of sturdy facts buttressed by aerial views of the extraordinary achievements of our extraordinary ancestors and prepared the foundations for next week’s look at Edward I and some very, very unhappy Celts.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Dr Sam enjoys his history rough and rambunctious. He illustrated his tales with cigarette cards featuring portraits of English monarchs, then got stuck into a bowl of spiced porridge and treated himself to a gold pigeon made from marchpane, a medieval kind of marzipan.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Willis went a bit off course here and resorted to trying to prove how important castles were by pointing out all the important things that had happened in them. That seemed like arguing that chairs were really the dominant force in European history because every great leader’s rear end had been on one at some pivotal moment.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The programme-makers filmed amazing shots of waves lashing tracks and fields turned to lakes, but failed to find the characters that surely, as everywhere else, lie beneath the glazed veneer of the boss class.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“The Railway showed a network at drowing point as it coped with floods in the West country and a tube strike in London. Apart from a few people pointlessly haranguing staff as if it was all their fault, the stoic reserved good nature of everyone was a thing to behold.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The whole thing is terribly British. As the west goes to hell in a handcart, as disaster piles on top of disaster, as the phones ring with news of ever greater catastrophes, control room manager Dave Slater says pensively, ‘It’s all a bit messy.’”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian