First Contact: An Alien Encounter; The Horne Section TV Show

“First Contact: An Alien Encounter was less War of the Worlds, more a quiet, Horizon-esque account of how things might unfold in the days after we receive an unknown signal from outer space. There was some quite interesting science here, updating us on how many potentially habitable planets we are discovering, and a whole lot of wishful speculation. Overall, this measured film might have been full of intelligent life but was the kind of thing to make you murmur ‘wow’ rather than yell it.”
James Jackson, The Times

“An indecipherable signal from space, in a language that the human race is incapable of understanding, doesn’t sound like promising material for a feature-length drama-documentary, but the BBC hit on a great idea here. Popular science is a difficult nut to crack, but this did the job admirably. The experts were engaging – in particular, US astrophysicist Dr Hakeem Oluseyi, who is such a natural communicator that I’d happily see him signed up by the BBC as a replacement for Prof Brian Cox.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Although it is billed as a dramatisation about what it would be like for us to encounter extraterrestrials, all we get is fuzzy mocked-up footage of space debris and a radio signal that probably isn’t Test Match Special but a cryptic message sent from a planet several hundred light years away. Talking heads, all disappointingly humanoid, witter about gravitation and radio frequencies. I wanted different talking heads, The Simpsons’ perma-drooling one-eyed extraterrestrials Kang and Kodos ideally, telling us Rishi Sunak has been vaporised and they are our new overlords.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“The most revealing moment in a long, dreary fantasy about life on other planets came when a scientist said: ‘I’d say there’s decades of work to be done.’ That sums up the whole extraterrestrial scam, the billions spent on telescopes in space and radio receiver dishes on mountaintops. What the astrophysicists are really searching for is not some non-human civilisation on a distant planet, but a guarantee of lifelong funding for their labs.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The Horne Section TV Show is a lot of fun. It’s a riotous, good-natured sitcom that sits somewhere between Flight of the Conchords and The Goodies. Better still, it manages to capture Horne’s onscreen energy – startled and awkward and relentlessly British – with perfect ease. It’s a slight show, but one that drips with charm. Neither Horne nor any of his band is a particularly natural performer, but that barely matters. It all adds to the homemade, thrown-together feel of the thing.”
Stuart Heritage, The Guardian