TV Critics: The Interceptor; Napoleon

“We’ve been spoiled by US imports, Nordic noir and impressively authored home-grown fare. This was the sort of low-grade guff that drives viewers away from terrestrial TV and into the arms of Sky and Netflix.”
Michael Hogan, The Telegraph

“It is insanely dull, unless you really, really like this sort of thing and/or have a particular fetish for watching good actors flinging their all at a thing that is stubbornly refusing to take flight.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Imagine an episode of EastEnders with a seriously ramped-up special-effects budget and a focus on dodgy dealing in the pubs, garages and caffs of Walford. That would go some way to describing the first episode of The Interceptor.”
Sally Newall, The Independent

“In Ash we have a hero with a boring domestic life, one discernible motivation, and a maverick tendency that distinguishes him from precisely no other TV detective at all. To make this work, OT Fagbenle would need to be John Thaw, Roger Moore and Matthew McConaughey merged into one.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“It’s a half-baked, half-hearted attempt to replace Spooks. The Beeb would love another show like that. But they won’t achieve it with lame imitations like The Interceptor, which appears to have been constructed from discarded cliches.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The dialogue is dodgier than a bloke in drag flying in from Paraguay with a bag containing a dozen plaster statues of the Pope. It’s a pity someone didn’t intercept this before it was made.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“It was exhaustive and exhausting. Who knew the little general had so much in him? If anyone who is not already a diehard fan of Andrew Roberts and Boney gets to the end of all three parts, could they let me know? You should probably be studied by science.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“This wasn’t so much biography as deluded propaganda. The BBC is so intent on being unpatriotic that, even on the 200th anniversary of Waterloo, it has to celebrate the despot who wanted to enslave this country. Luckily, it was hard to follow much of what Roberts said, because the background music sounded like a schoolboy playing the piano in gloves.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Much as a new view of Boney is long overdue, there are times when you must take Roberts with a large slug of vin rouge. His is, conspicuously, the only voice in the programmme and it’s a voice that becomes strained when it tries to explain away events like the Massacre of Jaffa in 1799.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Throughout this absorbing, but at times uncomfortably ingratiating, documentary historian Andrew Roberts was unapologetic in his admiration of the Little Corporal. He banged the drum like the most determined and confident candidate on the campaign trail.”
Sally Newall, The Independent

“Roberts began his sure-footed (ie, less than nimble) account by denouncing the lies history had spread about a ‘man of astonishing achievements’. What we, of course, wanted to know was whether the rumours about his diminutive manhood were also lies.”
Andrew Billen, The Times