Eternal You; Mary Berry’s Foolproof Dinners; Public Enemies

“It’s Halloween week and the undead are everywhere, infiltrating even serious-minded Storyville documentaries on BBC4. The latest, Eternal You, actually had nothing to do with shuffling cadavers — it was a lot more unsettling than that. To me at least; to others it might have offered a strange kind of hope because it explored how artificial intelligence can, with incredible sophistication, mimic a dead person by drawing on their digital history.”
James Jackson, The Times

“Eternal You is soberly directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck and beautifully balanced, looking at the motivations of users and creators, at the influence of the money involved, plus what the individual and collective pros and cons could be. It tackles the responsibilities of creators and legislators to protect us and circumscribe this digital project rather than pursue every possibility to its very end, and whether anything in human history should give us faith that this might happen. And yet it is impossible not to be horrified by the whole thing.
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Once you’ve got over the sci-fi weirdness, it throws up some fascinating questions about our attitudes to death. Are the people signing up for these services refusing to accept the reality of loss, or is this a valid way of grieving?”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“You might feel Alan Carr is somewhat overexposed on television, but he turned out to be the perfect pupil. He really, really can’t cook and lives on takeaways, which for some reason he insists are left on his doorstep. Dame Mary not only taught him a few simple recipes, but also gave some advice about dead-heading his rhododendrons. Is there nothing this wonderful woman doesn’t know? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she’d also re-pointed his rear wall and changed his spark plugs.”
Roland White, Daily Mail

“Clearly neither rapper, nor any member of their inner circle, was anywhere near this production. But if you’re sick of the usual hagiographies, maybe that’s no bad thing? Instead, we hear from people such as the seventh grade English teacher who encouraged young Lamar’s poetic talents, and who offers some sense of the traumatising effects of US gun violence. And the Canadian TV producer who turned Drake into a teen idol by casting him in the high school soap, Degrassi: The Next Generation.”
Ellen E Jones, The Guardian