TV Critics: The Repo Man; 12 Year Old Lifer; The Politician's Husband

“Sometimes, a programme comes along which succeeds purely on the eccentricity of the central figure. Repo Man was one of them.”
Jake Wallis Simons, The Telegraph

“Perhaps it didn’t expressly set out to equate poverty with fecklessness, poor judgment and greed, but it certainly seemed to be making the case that in ‘recession-hit Britain’, where increasing numbers of people resort to borrowing from finance companies at extortionate rates, the good guy is the bloke who waits in the dark for you to come home so he can take your car.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“There wasn’t anything complex or intriguing about James. He was a just a big fell in the pay of some bigger fellas. The real meat and two veg of the show, clearly, was the conflict: the opportunity to capture on camera real, live, ugly scenes of people in extremes of distress and fury. If you doubted that, you had only to look at your listings mag or your paper to see that this is a two-part show, even though there’s nothing about James to warrant two hours.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The film showed big Sean James on heroic raids to claim a couple of cares, a garage’s diagnostics machine and a Chinese restaurant’s oven. Disappointingly, only once did fisticuffs ensue.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Most of Sean’s customers had opted to have their features blurred into anonymity. It made them look like the victims of some strange virus, which fuzzed the face into a blob, and simultaneously induced bouts of swearing and an overwhelming sense of righteous indignation.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Without being in any way explicit about it, this film was a stunning indictment of America’s toxic relationship with firearms… They say that guns don’t kill people – people do – but here was a tragedy you could blame almost entirely on the gun, just for being there.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Zara Hayes’s film talked to relatives of the dead man and to Paul and Colt’s parents, and implicitly arraigned a system that had charged and tried children as if they were adults… Indignation at the retributive simplicities of the American legal system should have been tempered by the realisation that exactly the same thing could, and has, happened here.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“The strength of the script, and of the acting, was that it was somehow easy to both hate these characters and root for them… It may be true that real-life politicians tend to be too incompetent to achieve the Machiavellian heights of The Politician’s Husband. It may also be true that the scenes in Parliament were less than convincing, and the replica TV reports and interviews were cardboardy. But to focus on this would be to miss the point. The Politician’s Husband is a potent metaphor for gender politics in modern Britain; the political setting is secondary, and lends an extra charge.”
Jake Wallis Simons, The Telegraph

“Although the viewer didn’t actually ‘see’ anything during Hoyne’s anal rape of his wife Freya last night, it was one of the most disturbing TV sex scenes ever. After Tennant’s perfunctory spit into the palm of his hand pre-assault, I wanted to scrub my mind out… The drama works indecently well. You want to, but cannot, avert your eyes.”
Andrew Billen, The Times