007: The Road to a Million; The Newsreader; Stacey Dooley

“This is a high-concept, continent-bestriding adventure contest that only a streaming giant with bottomless pockets plus the backing of Barbara Broccoli could ponder funding. It’s great fun, which is a relief. The questions are just tricksy enough to stop the rest of us screaming every answer at the telly. It’s ravishingly and also daringly filmed.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“It is boring, soulless and derivative, of everything from Race Across the World to I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It is devoid of style, tension or anything else we might associate positively with his majesty’s longest secretly serving agent.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“I have watched the whole series and, apart from one jump-the-shark moment for Helen, it is a treat. Anna Torv is the tour de force furiously striding the news channel’s corridor in heels, power jackets and big hair.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“A bit like Danish coalition politics, the world of a Melbourne newsroom in the 1980s shouldn’t in theory grab anyone by the lapels. In practice its localism travels because the scripts are so clever, the characters so well drawn and the performances so persuasive.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“Stacey Dooley has a fear of death so making her visit an undertaker, watching while they embalmed bodies and sutured mouths, felt a bit like my editor asking me, an ophidiophobe, to sit in a snake pit. But the film was itself at times exceptionally moving.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“After visiting crematoriums, morgues and gravestone factories, she left as squeamish as she arrived. Her usual knack for empathetic questioning deserted her. Television rarely tackles the topic of death, which is foolish since most of the other TV taboos are long gone. Good documentaries are rare. That makes it all the more frustrating that Stacey shied away from her subject here.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail