TV Critics: The Zoo, Horizon: The Truth About Personality, The Apprentice

“It was hard to know exactly what the point of The Zoo was, other than as an hour-long advert for London and Whipsnade zoos. It was all quite jolly, I suppose. The keepers and vets seemed good-tempered and caring and the animals were unthreateningly anthropomorphised. It’s just that there’s only so much of Amy the Armadillo’s contraception regime, Nicky the Chimpanzee’s check-ups for congenital heart disease and Big Bertha the Burmese Python’s blocked nose I can take before feeling that I’m up to my neck in treacly sentimentality.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“The work of the zoo’s vets could have filled the entire programme and wouldn’t have been as lacklustre as the animal footage.”
Neil Midgley, The Telegraph

“It was an entertaining hour, though not an altogether successful one. There was some interesting material on the correlation between positivity and longevity, the changes in our DNA over a lifetime and the meditational and cognitive bias modification exercises that can alter mood perception, but no killer piece of conclusive evidence. In a science programme, it’s not enough for Mosley to look through a few minutes of old family cine film from holidays in the early 1960s and conclude he had a happy childhood. Not least as he, in the same breath, described his father as largely absent. This isn’t proof; it’s unreliable memory.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“During its recent run Horizon has been a bit depressing. Like the programme’s approach to difficult science, the results of Michael Mosley’s seven-week self-improvement programme were admirably clear. When Mosley went back to the Essex boffins his right brain and his left were much more in balance. Just this breath going in, just this breath going out, that’s the mediative secret to true happiness. Oh, and always search out the one happy face on  your train to work.”
Neil Midgley, The Telegraph

“The trouble is that the state of TV at the moment does not allow us entirely to trust shows such as this. As so often Horizon proceeded from one scientist with a research grant to grind to another and none was sufficiently grilled.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Poor old Michael Mosley. A bestselling diet book and a regular gig as the BBC’s resident media doctor but he still wakes up in the middle of the night, imaging catastrophes.”
Matt Baylis, The Daily Express

“Now, there’s a school of thought in the entrepreneurial world that says: don’t put potential business partners through ten weeks of pointless games and then and only then grant a handful of them an interview. I say a school. I mean that’s something no entrepreneur ever does or has ever considered doing. Except, of course, Lord Sugar. Lucky us. After ten weeks of hawking cabbages, caravans and chair-tables, the five survivors of his personal Hunger Games have earned a handshake and maybe even a hello from his four most trusted interviewers.”
Tom Meltzer, The Guardian

“Lord Sugar is gearing up for a battle of the babes in the sexiest final ever.”
Peter Dyke, The Daily Star