Billy Connolly Does; The Big Freeze; Vikings: Valhalla

“After 50 years of shows, there is plenty of material to look back on. What’s striking is how familiar much of it is, how woven into the fabric of British comedy culture his work has been. The anecdotes are criminally entertaining, though I am not sure how necessary the animations are: just hearing him describe a trifle down the trousers is enough.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“Billy Connolly may have given up the drink nearly 40 years ago, but the years he spent being ‘wild’ have given him a lifetime’s worth of anecdotes, as we saw in the gloriously upbeat documentary Billy Connolly Does…. Obviously alcohol wrecks lives, but this was not a censorious look back at the hellraiser days, more of a celebratory one, interspersed with clips from his stand-up shows.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Snatches of classic stand-up routines included one he did until he retired from the stage four years ago, the ‘drunk walks’. It isn’t until you see him staggering sideways across the stage, like a dressage pony on a steep slope, that you realise what a marvellous physical comedian he was. Parkinson’s disease has robbed him of much of his dancer’s grace but none of his presence — or his vocabulary.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The record producer Pete Waterman proved to be one of the most engaging talking heads in this grimly fascinating documentary. The documentary team had chosen people old enough to have experienced it at the time, so leaned heavily on Waterman, Margaret Beckett, Gloria Hunniford and the weatherman John Kettley, together with Pathé footage, to pad out what was an engaging but occasionally repetitive film.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“This was a well-edited programme, put together by ITN, featuring archive footage and reminiscences from various talking heads. At first, I did wonder why they had assembled such a random selection of contributors, but they all added lovely bits of colour.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The hardships were bleak, but record producer Pete Waterman, weatherman John Kettley and newsman John Craven were among the others who couldn’t hide their nostalgia for the times. Lord knows how we’d cope now. Just think of the elf’n’safety implications.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Historians could probably have a field day picking through Vikings: Valhalla, the epic new series from Netflix. The rest of us can enjoy it for what it is: a lusty adventure with a Hollywood script and a cast of manly warriors who look as if they’ve just stepped out of a salon.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“It’s fun, no more, no less. Bit of history, bit of gore, bit of sex, bit of plot, lots of hair. As mindless distraction at a gruelling time, it will be hard to beat.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian