TV Critics: Young Margaret; The Village

“The insights into Baroness Thatcher’s early life offered by BBC2’s Young Margaret: Love, Life and Letters were in a different class from other TV tributes. Moore’s attention to detail, along with insights from the author himself, was flecked all the way through the programme.”
Neil Midgley, The Telegraph

“As all soap opera fans know, you don’t have to like a character to want to watch him or her. What matters is whether the character comes across as a real flesh and blood human. That’s what this programme achieved for the late Baroness Thatcher: revealing the beating heart beneath the Iron Lady. In that sense, it was a fine tribute.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“She was a bore, a boaster and a bully, friendless, joyless, loveless, demanding, controlling, snobbish, racist and mean, even to her own dad. I expect a fan would have seen a programme about a determined, strong young woman preparing to be a great leader. She did that – divided. Rest in peace.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“Not once, I think, in any of the included correspondence, was there any indication that Margaret Hilda thought of anybody but herself. The programme was not so much a matter of revelation as confirmation, of what one had always feared.”
Andrew Billen, The Timest

“Did you want more about Margaret Thatcher? Young Margaret: Life, Love & Letters revealed that she and her first boyfriend at Oxford had enjoyed a ‘modest amount of amorosity, for want of a better word’. Too much? I thought so.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“So much of The Village is precisely what you always hope television will be – serious, beautifully austere, and grandly ambitious. It might make you giggle from time to time, with its exhaustive inventory of the miseries of early-20th-century life, but then you find yourself gripped by its willingness to let a scene run… It may be tough going at times, but I’m in for the duration.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent