TV Critics: The Voice; Harry Hill’s Stars in Their Eyes; Britain's Tudor Treasure

“Negative comments were kept to a minimum. Which is all very honourable but it hardly makes for exciting TV. Never had I pined so much for Simon Cowell’s theatrical cruelty.”
Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph

“The Voice is a third-rate rip-off of The X Factor, with too many gimmicks and not half enough excitement. Visually it’s a rubbish idea, and it’s impractical, too.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“An angel’s voice soared from a butter-ball body, a young lad was mistaken for a girl and a theatre usherette sang opera. Everyone is good so the judges (not the acts) are embarrassed when a singer remains unchosen, and must abjectly apologise. Whether we can take all this virtue until the coaches each accumulate 12 singers to their teams is another question.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Is there anything more cringe than the judges’ joint musical performance on The Voice UK. Series four opened with a rendition of Republica’s 1996 hit ‘Ready to Go’ sung by Sixties sex bomb Sir Tom Jones, hip-hop windbag will-i-am, the ever-apologetic Kaiser Chief frontman Ricky Wilson, and pop poseur Rita Ora. Mercifully, it was soon over and straight into the blind auditions.”
Ellen E Jones, The Independent

“I’m sorry, judges. I’m the judge of the judges and that’s just not good enough. Not only do you need to be decisive, make good decisions and be accountable, but also if you’re saying you would have turned if you’d been able to see who it was, doesn’t that make a mockery of the whole concept of The Voice?”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Everything on TV is so damned serious these days, and Harry Hill’s Stars in Their Eyes is a gloriously unpretentious antidote. Also, despite its lunatic edge it somehow manages to be honest in what it is trying to achieve. Clearly Hill just wants everyone to have a good time. I did.”
Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph

“Corny jokes, slapstick, dressing up and a few songs we all know made this full-on family fare — old- fashioned Saturday night viewing that didn’t take itself seriously.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“When it worked, it worked. The problem is that Hill’s relationship with real life, and by association with real people, is tangential. And when he congratulated the lookalikes on their performances everyone looked embarrassed.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“The details were pretty fascinating but a pair of good presenters like David Starkey and Lucy Worsley didn’t need all the dressing-up antics to bring them alive. If money was going to be spent, it might, perhaps, have been diverted from the costumes and the extras and onto the baptismal font, which ended up as a model, slighly smaller than my son’s Playmobil castle.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“As chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, Worsley was our guide to the palace. Starkey, for his part, did an excellent job of explaining the mindset of the wife-beheading, daughter-dismissing king in the lead-up to his son’s birth. When, at last, all 90-something volunteers were costumed, it was as if the court of King Henry VIII had risen from the grave.”
Ellen E Jones, The Independent