TV Critics: Town with Nicholas Crane; Love & Death in City Hall; Frankie

“Towns” is not a word that sits comfortably alongside an exclamation mark. It isn’t a word into which you can easily inject breathless excitement. Not that that was going to stop the presenter of Town with Nicholas Crane from having a go.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“There’s no getting away from it, Town with Nicholas Crane is Coast with Nicholas Crane, only ever so slightly urbanised, the odd traffic light about the place. But next week he is in Saffron Walden in Essex, how will that work? Well it will just be Coast inland, obviously.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Mostly, these tales were told in unforgiving close up, forcing the viewer to confront truths that were sometimes uncomfortable. We heard the story of Tracy McEntee who was getting married in the church where she had buried her baby, and Sammy Redmond who, slowly, numbly, had to register his father’s death.”
Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph

“Actually this is nice. Hospital is surely the building in which the most significant human events of all take place. A register office, the setting for Guy King’s touching observational film, is certainly a less obvious source. But here, too, we’re dealing with birth and death, just less dramatically, and less immediately.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“The character is as grimly off-putting as she was in the first episode and the drama still seems to believe that, with a bit of exasperation, we’ll all love her. We’re not supposed to like Dr Evans, the steely by-the-book GP who is always trying to thwart Frankie’s acts of kindness, but I find myself completely on Dr Evans’s side.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent