The Fear Clinic: Face Your Phobia; Prime Target

“As a programme, it hovers ceaselessly at the border between exploitative and edifying. Just a little more effort, a little more information and a little less dwelling on the sight of people reacting in ways beyond their control to apparently harmless objects and creatures could have sent it easily into the latter territory. As it is, it’s hard to watch without at least some sense that we shouldn’t be.”
Lucy Mangan,The Guardian

“The series will be fascinating viewing for any viewer with a phobia who might start to ponder a bright new dawn in which they never again need to worry about entering their spider-infested shed. For others, one’s enjoyment of the programme seems to be predicated on how much you enjoy watching people freak out at the sight of a pigeon.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“The resident psychologists do little that you haven’t seen in filler segments on morning television, where people are encouraged to ‘face their fears’ by stroking tarantulas or letting rats perch on their shoulders.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“We seemingly love watching other people being terrified. So the makers of Channel 4’s new series The Fear Clinic: Face Your Phobia are clearly on to something. Plus, there is the spectacle of people being cured – the staple of every hospital docuseries. The programme could do with more backstories. I also would like a deeper delve into the neuroscience, but The Fear Clinic plainly doesn’t have any ambitions to stray into Hannah Fry territory. It is more about lives changed for the better – and the startling array of phobias out there.”
Gerard Gilbert, The i

“It is derivative, preposterous, utterly unbelievable and great fun. It’s got confidence and style and is here to deliver escapism to the power of pi cubed, or something, and it does. Prime ridiculous entertainment.”
Lucy Mangan,The Guardian

“Leo Woodall is the actor of the moment, but he can’t save the absolute gubbins that is Prime Target. A certain amount of silliness can work in a spy thriller. Black Doves on Netflix pulls it off. But Prime Target, fatally, takes itself seriously. The first episode is sufficiently zippy to pull you in, but as a bingewatch it soon sags under the weight of a nonsensical plot and a feeling that everything you are seeing has been thrown in to satisfy the algorithm.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph