Election TV; Tom Kerridge Cooks Britain

“Once the big results flowed in, it didn’t much matter which channel you picked, but before that there were two clear victors. Channel 4 pepped up when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Carol Vorderman rocked up at some point past midnight and started being rude to everyone. Sky’s gang, with Andy Burnham and Ruth Davidson as genuinely polarised pundits, constantly shouted over each other and often forgot they had left an interviewee hanging on the giant screen behind them, because they were having too much chatty fun. Embracing the madness was the winning tactic.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“At times, election night broadcasting feels like an obligation. Overnight audiences, spread across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, will be vanishingly small. Eventually, financial good sense may prevail, and the private sector channels will concede the night to our monolithic public broadcaster. But, for now, everyone wants to write their draft of history, to capture that moment of epochal change. The result, this time, was a quartet of exhausting, patience-testing but oddly moving testaments to the great exercise of democracy.”
Nick Holton, The Independent

“Poke around the ITV website and you’ll see that this series is delivered by a division of the broadcaster called BE Studio, ‘a full service creative studio producing ad-funded entertainment [which] helps brands build emotional connections with ITV’s audience’. I’d rather ITV just served up a normal cooking show, thanks. But maybe this is the future?”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“There is nothing inherently wrong with Tom Kerridge Cooks Britain, it is just that there is not particularly anything to it, either. Over half an hour, there are more mentions of the supermarket chain sponsoring the show than there are recipes for the ingredients it highlights (the dishes look delicious, but there are only two of them). Kerridge has been fronting ads for this chain, which pushes a ‘meet the farmers’ campaign, for a while now. This six-part series is simply an extended version of those adverts, repackaged as a television series, in which we get to see some of the pickers, too. It is perfectly pleasant, if flavourless.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“I like Kerridge. He is smiley and seems a nice chap. I would rather watch him cook any day than, say, Gordon Ramsay or Gino d’Acampo with all their strutting machismo. But this script made a Michelin-starred chef sound like a product-pushing influencer. M&S — be more subtle. Interestingly, the hard-working vegetable and fruit pickers at these farms all seemed to be foreign. Let’s have an episode about them.”
Carol Midgley, The Times