“This is genuinely creepy, genuinely clever, without trying to rewrite the rules”

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The Living and the Dead, BBC1

“With their rustic Somerset accents and their couplings in copses, the cast of this series, for the most part, play on that theme. So do Nathan and Harriet who in best Seventies horror tradition, rarely miss a chance to do a scene in their underwear. Unlike Hammer vampire movies, though, this is genuinely creepy, genuinely clever, without trying to rewrite the rules.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Right at the end, there was a twist I didn’t see coming and which I heartily enjoyed. It’s shaping up to be a nice six hours of spooky fun and games”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“I’m all for ghost stories full of ideas. My favourite television ghost story was Don Taylor’s The Exorcism in 1972, in which the theme was inequality and third-world starvation. However, like The Turn of the Screw, it was also terrifying. On this count, The Living and the Dead was lacking.”  
Andrew Billen, The Times

Life Inside Jail: Hell On Earth, ITV

“The camera kept being drawn elsewhere, though, mostly to the haunting sight of a dead-eyed young man in vast, yellow prison overalls. He’d never been in trouble before, he had a wife, a young son, he had a scholarship to study nanophysics. He was going to spend his entire life in jail for murder.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

Inside Porton Down, BBC4

“I don’t know – it just seemed a bit… needy, to me. Which is not really what I look for in my scientific or military instructions. I’d prefer to think of everyone and everything concerned with overseeing national security as emotionally robust. Maybe even a little defiant. Secure enough not to need lots of birthday fuss, anyway. Your job is to do secret things secretly? STAY SECRET THEN.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

Taskmaster, Dave

“This is the panel show that divines comedians’ characters through daft tasks such as, yesterday, speed eating an egg or ordering on the phone a cheese-free vegetarian pizza with bacon and salami without using the words “cheese”, “bacon”, “salami” or indeed, “pizza”. The panellist Katherine Ryan is a particular delight. As a Canadian, she explains her apparent nominal aphasia to the pizza shop with the catch-all “I am not from England”.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

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