Into Dinosaur Valley; The Ice Cream Wars; Adrian Dunbar: My Ireland

“Dan Snow started out as a military historian but has carved out a healthy career covering everything, from Tutankhamun and the Terracotta Warriors to 1066 and the Vikings. He’s pretty good at it too, making accessible programmes without treating the audience like idiots. And he’s a likeable presence who hasn’t disappeared up his own fundament. This programme focused on the great 19th-century ‘dino rush’ in which explorers flocked to the American West in search of prehistoric treasures. It was a neat mix of history and CGI T-Rexes.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“This 90-minute, one-off documentary was crammed with entertaining anecdotes. I was delighted to learn that a lifelong feud between America’s most famous fossil-hunters, Ed Cope and O.C. Marsh, began when one pointed out that the other had stuck a plesiosaur head on the wrong end of its skeleton — at the tip of its tail instead of its neck.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Director and producer Robert Neill has done an unhurried, unsensationalist deep dive into the tragedy with contemporary news footage, accounts from the local police and the serious crimes squad officers of the time, and reporters on the case. The documentary is a sober, solid unpicking of the case itself and of its effects on those around it.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“A gritty, working class sense of humour scoured through this story of gangland enmities in the 1980s, when criminals fought to control lucrative trade on Glasgow’s housing estates. But the hostilities became barbaric, with an arson attack on one driver’s flat when petrol was poured through the letterbox. The second episode charts the investigation and court case. Grim, shocking stuff.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“There are low-key travelogues and then there is Adrian Dunbar: My Ireland. The actor goes to the pub with his friends. He tells us he likes gardening. He reminisces about Sunday afternoon picnics in his boyhood. It is almost wilfully undramatic, and a perfectly pleasant way to spend an hour.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Wednesday is a wonderful creation, an eye-rolling antiheroine with strong opinions on everything from social media and emojis to coffee. However, even Tim Burton can’t sustain eight hours of TV on weirdness alone and an unlikely narrative decision is taken by the showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to turn Wednesday into a teen detective, investigating a series of grisly murders in the woods surrounding Nevermore, making it a far more formulaic proposition than it first seemed.”
Joe Clay, The Times