TV Critics: The Secret Life of Rubbish; Captive; Falcón; Great Continental Railway Journeys; The Aristocrats

“This was an interesting and provocative documentary, cannily broadcast in the run-up to Christmas when we’re hastily acquiring even more stuff we don’t need.”
Vicky Frost, The Guardian

“I’m not sure my own interest in bin culture can extend to a week’s wait and another hour of TV, to be honest. BBC4 excels, in the main, at short doses of slightly off-beam cultural history, not the longer runners.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Captive wasn’t a simple tale of heroic survival against the odds. It was a story about suspicion and doubt and the mysteries of human behaviour. A pretty depressing one too, even if you decided to acquit director Rob Farquhar of the charge of supermarket-tabloid prurience that his title invited… Had Tanya’s abuse at the hands of her own mentally disturbed mother twisted her so badly that she would lie about what had happened? Or had it merely made her the perfect victim for a calculating and controlling man?… You simply weren’t given enough evidence here to make a firm decision either way.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It looks sensational, the plots are satisfyingly twisty, and Csokas does the whole sexy, brooding genius thing with style… But credibility and character are sometimes sacrificed for pace, and the script has great chunks of pure exposition… Still, the plot remains gripping. I might not miss the dialogue, but I definitely won’t miss next week’s finale.”
Vicky Frost, The Guardian

“Rather like the Jungfraubahn cog railway, which misses the best of the scenery by making much of its steep ascent to the peak underground, the show doesn’t always showcase its subject matter perfectly. The balance is not quite right: I’d rather we had more trains, or more Edwardians, or more of the heartbreakingly beautiful scenery that provided a backdrop throughout, than this not-entirely-cohesive mixture of travelogue, history lesson and love-letter to the railway.
Vicky Frost, The Guardian

“The second Aristocrats documentary, on the glory that is Goodwood, was better than the first on the bluffers on Blenheim. It was less sycophantic although still curiously incurious… What sort of deals do these aristocrats screw out of the documentary makers at Oxford Films: spend a year with us, by all means old boy, but leave my family out of it?”
Andrew Billen, The Times