Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story; Holby City; Moon Knight

“Sixty years on from the Whitehouse beginnings as the BBC botherer of botherers, it succeeds in making an even-handed, unmalicious documentary about her that is at pains to tease apart the issues with which she was concerned and intelligently evaluate them against her contemporary norms and ours now. To anyone used to spending (too much) time on social media, it is a deeply odd and almost spiritually refreshing experience to consume something that admits – in fact not only admits, but insists – that a person and her work were neither wholly good nor wholly bad and, moreover, that the one does not negate the other. They did her proud, and it made me oddly proud of the BBC – which she would, one assumes, have hated.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“What was striking from watching the first episode of Hannah Berryman’s probing, eloquent documentary was what a pioneer Mrs Whitehouse was and what a total self-promoter too. There were so many discussion points thrown up by the programme that you wondered what Whitehouse herself would have thought of it. Delighted to be back in the frame, no doubt, while tutting at all its clips of old-school nudity.”
James Jackson, The Times

“The exclamation mark in the title is a clue as to what didn’t quite work about this documentary, which could never decide if it was redeeming the reputation of the much-maligned campaigner against ‘moral pollution’ or if it was gleefully sending her up.”
Chris Bennion, The Telegraph

“While the film was too nuanced to draw easy answers, underpinning everything was the question of whether, in particular respects, she was right. Does our contemporary reading of Whitehouse as a prudish conservative whose views are as outdated as her tightly-curled hairdo need an update? A compelling and balanced look at Whitehouse, then, that showed how she, often just like the material she argued against, can’t be viewed in black and white.
Gwendolyn Smith, The i

After a not-a-dry-eye-in-the-ward death, the episode ended with a mournful tribute to donors and, perhaps inevitably, our NHS heroes. Then it was over. No uplifting coda, no plane crash catastrophe, just the sound of sorrowful cellos — a tastefully done closure for a midweek soap.”
James Jackson, The Times

“There have been explosions, kidnappings, treachery and more gunfights than the OK Corral. A tough gig to follow. As it transpired, the beautifully-judged finale was the most powerful encomium, the most poignant love letter to the NHS since Danny Boyle’s London 2012 Olympics curtain-raiser. Dignified, deeply moving and written with great mastery, this final Holby City leave-taking had all the heft of an ending without feeling like the end.”
Judith Woods, The Telegraph

“If you thought the torrent of big-budget television had dulled its capacity to surprise, get ready for this. Moon Knight throws everything and the kitchen sink at its story. Yet it does it all with the raucous aplomb a blank Disney chequebook gets you. If you grew up watching people pretending to shoot each other in The A-Team with plastic guns and one exploding car, the action scenes alone in Moon Knight will knock your socks off. Neither highbrow nor lowbrow this is all-brow, the Liam Gallagher of TV drama. And (unlike Liam Gallagher) it is tremendously good fun.”
Benji Wilson, The Telegraph

“It’s fair to say that superheroes aren’t my thing. Perhaps that’s because I’m an adult in a functioning relationship, or perhaps it’s simply that I don’t have the stomach for protracted low stakes violence. But Moon Knight, to its enormous credit, solves many of the problems I have with Marvel’s cinematic offerings. Fight sequences last five minutes, rather than 45, and have the goofy, slapstick charm of Naked Gun or Johnny English.”
Nick Hilton, The Independent