Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure; Wham!; Florence Nightingale: Nursing Pioneer

“Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure did have plenty of visual joys. It’s just that it needed more insight. Bettany Hughes, who is a friend of Lumley’s, does at least bring academic expertise and insight, which earns her privileged access to archaeological sites. Lumley’s principal role seems to be to breathily gush, smile, say words like ‘golly’ a lot and float around in lots of linen. It makes for soothing but often slightly enervating television.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“Celebrity travelogues are the scourge of television but I will always make an exception for Lumley. Her enthusiasm never flags and nor do her manners. She seems to belong to another time, rather like Michael Palin. She is friendly and gracious to everyone she meets, whether that’s a team of teenage footballers with whom she shares a boat ride, or a truck driver guiding her through Jakarta’s traffic. The history here was also genuinely informative.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Generally, the story of a lucrative trade established centuries ago is one of brutal colonisation of the unlucky occupants of a suddenly valuable land – and a rising tide of misery thereafter. Our greater consciousness of this fact makes a visit to such a land by a posh, white lady born in India under the Raj inherently, unavoidably tricky.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Perhaps it’s precisely because the source material comes from Ridgeley’s mother that this film is one-note and overly fawning. You come away thinking that Wham! just weren’t all that interesting – something fans know is not the case at all. Wham! isn’t a complete waste of an hour and a half. It’s a fun celebration of a snapshot in time, when youth culture and pop music were at their zenith. But if fans are looking for anything deeper than a scrapbook of highlights, you won’t find it here.”
Emily Baker, The i

“I fully expected it to be a revisionist history, starting with Nightingale’s achievements but then explaining why she was a terrible human. So it came as a great surprise that this documentary about Nightingale was laudatory from beginning to end. How could the BBC commission such a thing? The answer is that they didn’t – it was made by the French, and Lucy Worsley’s narration was added later.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph