TV Critics: This is England ’90; An Inspector Calls; It Was Alright in the 1980s

“It’s so authentic and convincing – the characters, the performances, the way they talk, the detail – that it doesn’t even feel much like watching drama. More like catching up with a bunch of old mates you haven’t seen for a while.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“It promised nostalgia with edge, but this drama was as boring as the unemployed, illiterate losers it glorified. Harry Enfield used to do a sketch about thick, thieving Scousers who bumbled into each other and burbled ‘Eh! Eh! All right, calm down!’ This Is England was like an hour of that.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Shane Meadows can mix comedy and tragedy to brilliant effect but this episode was played for laughs, including a painfully unfunny duo in shell suits and aviators who deserved far less screen time.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The dialogue sounds semi-improvised but is too often dangerously heightened towards sketch comedy. As so often it is left to Shaun, played by Thomas Turgoose, who moves us.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Still weeping over his ex, Shaun veered between desperately trying to hide his emotions and spectacularly failing. The performance was so compelling; his pain appeared so raw, so real, that I wanted to slide into the TV just to tell him it wasn’t.”
Amy Burns, The Independent

“What a present for the new Labour leader An Inspector Calls was last night. It could only have been bettered if JB Priestley’s 1945 warhorse had been updated to now, relocated to Hoxton and if the Birling family had been turned from mill owners into internet entrepreneurs. For anyone other than a Corbynista, this warhorse delivered a powerful kick, and where it hurts.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“An Inspector Calls, sensitively adapted here by Helen Edmundson, time-travels remarkably well: it translates into gripping 21st-century television.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“This was as good an adaptation as it could be. But there is a reason why Priestley’s didactic play is no longer loved. Part drawing room whodunit, part socialist manifesto, it has the subtlety of a sledgehammer.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“An Inspector Calls served as Sunday night costume drama. But it’s hard to shake the suspicion that some at the BBC really do want to time-travel back to the era of the Society For Cultural Relations With The USSR.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“From Faith Brown’s horrendously bad taste impression of Caribbean cook Rustie Lee on TV AM to Terry Nutkins’ bizarre romance with a sea lion in Animal Magic, it was an awkward hour of cringefully offensive TV. Every joke in the Eighties, it would appear, was made at the expense of race. It was a truly shameful set of footage.”
Amy Burns, The Independent