Amandaland; Apple Cider Vinegar

“Between them, Lucy Punch and Joanna Lumley provide more laughs per scene than other BBC comedies do per year. The whole piece is so well done that you won’t find yourself missing Anna Maxwell Martin or Diane Morgan. Punch excels at physical comedy and is hilarious as she tries to style out her reduced circumstances.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The gags – about Gloria Hunniford, the Just Seventeen problem page and Sinn Féin – are very British and aimed at a very particular audience, namely strung out middle-aged mums longing to laugh until they wee a bit at jokes about wellness supplements. Too rarely do we get the chance. Ultimately, though, this is Amanda’s show. Her descent from alpha west London mummy to single mother carrying a mood board on a bike to sell waste disposal units is uproarious, but also unexpectedly moving. This is largely due to Lucy Punch’s comic timing and earnest delivery of killer lines.”
Chitra Ramaswamy, The Guardian

“Punch carries most of the heavy lifting with ease, and the result is not only a spin-off that punches above its weight: it is lovely, life-affirming escapism.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Joanna Lumley has made a career out of stealing shows. She can be great in a starring role, but when she’s the support act, she’s Absolutely Fabulous. From the moment she stumbles through the front door in Amandaland, Dame Joanna gathers up the laughs and sweeps them into her handbag like an aristocratic shoplifter on a spree.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Instead of school fundraisers and birthday swimming parties, life in Amandaland is now about underage drinking, secret Instagram accounts and GCSEs but the children are far more prominent and the show is the more ordinary for it. And while it may simply be a new show finding its feet, the group dynamic doesn’t click quite so effortlessly as that of the Motherland crew. That said, like Motherland, there is a high gag rate, some well-deployed slapstick and spot-on observational details.”
Rachel Sigee, The i

“Apple Cider Vinegar is a fast, drily witty, acutely intelligent, compassionate and furious commentary on greed, need, mass delusion, self-deception, the exploitation of the credulous, and the enabling of insidious new forms of all of these by technology.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“It’s a fine piece of storytelling that reminds us that we underestimate the awesome power of social media at our peril. This is not just funny cat videos, beautiful people and vanity; it’s a place where elections are decided, fortunes are made and lives can be fundamentally changed — or even lost.”
Tim Glanfield, The Times

“The series succeeds because of Kaitlyn Dever, who is sensational throughout, but also because of how the story is told. It bombards you with unreliable narrators, characters suddenly talking to camera, fractured timelines, digressions and on-screen graphics and captions. There is no single narrative keel. Normally this would be a failing, but over the course of the six episodes it turns out to be a strategy. Apple Cider Vinegar is trying to show how truth, a single definitive perspective, has been so devalued by the kaleidoscope of fact-adjacent opinions online (and people willing to parrot them), that someone like Belle Gibson was able to sell her quite obviously snakey snake oil as an elixir.”
Benji Wilson, The Telegraph

“Apple Cider Vinegar surprised me with its breadth and depth at every turn. Far from an opportunistic attempt to capitalise on a popular story, it is an example of formidable, ambitious storytelling in its own right, looking our deepest fears – and the contortions we get into to evade them – straight in the eye.”
Emily Watkins, The i