Double the Money; Bodkin

“The presence of Sue Perkins and the strong whiff of The Apprentice makes this far from a mould-busting innovation in reality formatting. But it is cheerful and quite well cast – and there were tears before the first ad break. As the money doubles, so should the fun.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“The show takes 13 duos, hands them a sum of cash and challenges them to do a spot of wheeler-dealing to increase their bank balances by 100 per cent. It’s a format apparently devised by TV toffs who regard the thought of actually having to make a living as amusingly quirky, a world of Arfur Daley enterprises. Trying to keep track of 13 pairs was dizzying. All of them have a touching back story, of course, though cramming their personal tragedies into a couple of sentences emphasised how mechanical this all was.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“I have rarely been as ungripped by an opening episode as I was by that of Bodkin. However, my sense of professional duty required me to stick with it, and by the third I was having a splendid time. There is enough credibility to the mystery, enough jokes to keep it from becoming a straight thriller and enough oddity to keep things interesting without unbalancing the whole. It gains in pace, charm (and in dead bodies) and that first hour turns out to be an investment worth making.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“It is a lush-looking murder mystery mickey-take of true crime podcasts and I’m afraid I tired of it quite quickly. Don’t get me wrong, the performances are good. Some are very good. The writer Jez Scharf’s script is fine and often witty. West Cork, where it was largely filmed, looks lovely. But little about the people or the events rings true. Not the plot, nor the dynamic between the three leading characters or any of the people they meet along the way. It feels too — what’s the word? — cartoonish, as if we were playing Irish cliché bingo. Everything is thrown into the mix and the resulting pie is uneven, with some parts tastier than others.”
Carol Midgley, The Times