Maryland; Unvaccinated; The South Bank Show

“It was a blisteringly eloquent roar, a fluent polemic proving that some of the best things are written quickly. It didn’t go for the obvious in its outrage at the woeful way two traumatised women (played by Zawe Ashton and Hayley Squires) were treated by the police when trying to report sexual assaults. It showed more subtly how they were belittled and patronised by an ill-trained officer’s attempts at banal small talk (“You’re gonna larf. You’re both called Mary!”) and the crass lack of empathy.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“The first (played by Hayley Squires, who starred in Adult Material, Kirkwood’s series about the pornography industry, created by an all-female team) is pugnacious, the second (Zawe Ashton) more cowed – but they hold themselves with the particular stillness that tells you they are shattered. Most women will recognise it. A quarter of us have held ourselves that way. The others have borne witness to a friend, a family member, a loved one, a colleague, a stranger or a client doing the same. Simple maths makes us all part of Maryland.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Watch this scene as a female, and your insides clench. It is an instinctive fear…As a piece of television, it is highly theatrical. The dialogue is stagey, and I wished it had been modified for the screen. The words “rape” and “murder” are replaced by a metallic shriek. A chorus of modern-day furies reel off the things that have become as normal to them as remembering bin collection day.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph 

“Maryland instead forces us to confront the reality of those words. Squires and Ashton are exceptional, the camera lingering on their faces as they desperately try to hold onto their sense of self as it fragments around them. Kirkwood’s bold, lyrical script pulsates with simmering rage and sparks of dark, droll humour. There is catharsis as it points a trembling finger of fury at a world that allows a woman to be killed by a man every three days.”
Rachael Sigee, The i

“If the motive was to persuade people to get the vaccine – people who presumably have heard these sorts of statistics before but rejected them – then that description wasn’t going to help…The programme did at least feature a range of reasons for not getting the vaccine.” 
Anita Singh, The Telegraph 

“What this show needed was not a statistician but a psychologist. It’s useless to bombard people with facts and figures, while failing to address what lies beneath.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“As the programme goes on, it becomes a useful compendium of infuriatingly common misunderstandings…Fry also has a bash at explaining correlation without causation: that person you read about online who developed a serious health condition the day after the jab doesn’t constitute strong evidence that the jab is unsafe. Eventually, this mythbusting starts to hit home.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“The hour-long chat plugged Frank’s latest enthusiasm, his poetry podcast, and highlighted a lovely verse by Black Country poet Liz Berry, about pigeons, called Birmingham Roller. Frank saw himself in the pigeons. It’s all about the emotion.” 
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“His interview with Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show showed us that the advanced Skinner, a man now uncomfortable with some of his past material and who thinks seriously, is intellectually curious and hungry to “wallow deeply” in poetry but, like all comedians, is always seeking the next gag.” 
Carol Midgley, The Times