“The opening episode of Nightsleeper was a high-speed blast from start to finish”

Nightsleeper

Nightsleeper, BBC1

“Nightsleeper is 15 carriages of high-speed hokum, impossible to take seriously. But if you surrender to the momentum, it’s an entertaining ride.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The opening episode of Nightsleeper was a high-speed blast from start to finish. I came to Nightsleeper with low expectations – the bare synopsis sounded unimaginatively generic. But this promises to be an intricately constructed, high-speed ride – let’s just hope it doesn’t get stuck at a red signal sometime around episode four.”
Gerard Gilbert, The i

“For all its adrenalin-rush moments – Joe Cole makes a fine action hero – the basic premise makes about as much sense as the rail ticket pricing system. Nightsleeper is built for binge-watching, its cliffhanger moments the TV equivalent of rubber-necking: you know you should look away but you really can’t. Suspend your disbelief and go along for the ride.”
Keith Watson, The Telegraph

“It is set on the Glasgow to London overnight train and it is fantastically dreadful. Most of it involves members of the cast standing round and staring doomily at a device that has been discovered attached to some wiring in the conductor’s cabin floor. As the minutes and hours unfold, matters become increasingly ridiculous and even within the elastic definition we apply to these capers, absurd.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“The implausibilities started from the opening frame. If you were about to start a serious incident so that something sinister could be planted on a train, would you sit at the piano in Glasgow railway station eerily pressing the same key repeatedly, making you stand out as a weirdo? Even the exciting twist at the end doesn’t change the fact that this is very schlocky.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Into the Abyss, a new feature-length documentary by Robin Barnwell, suffers from the same fundamental problem as the BBC’s The Darkest Days, shown in April. It does a fine job of conveying the scale of the horror and terror inflicted on Israel on 7 October 2023, when fighters from Hamas, the organisation that governs the Palestinian territory of Gaza, invaded. But it doesn’t manage the same for the 11 months of attacks on Gaza by the Israeli military that have followed.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“Everyone has their view about who is to blame or whether Israel’s response is justified. We can debate broadcasters’ bias. But Barnwell’s focus is on the victims, and here he achieves balance. The terrified Jewish child in the kibbutz and the terrified Palestinian boy in the hospital are both suffering through no fault of their own.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

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