Return to Paradise; Queen Camilla: The Wicked Stepmother

“The first episode is really a masterclass in writing this kind of show, because we get DI Mackenzie Clarke’s back story, an introduction to all the main players, and the murder of the week, all wrapped up with a bow in the space of an hour. It’s easygoing, formulaic fun, but Anna Samson’s performance grates. Clarke is a social misfit who displays zero human emotion, and plays every scene with the goggle-eyed stare of someone who has just sat on a cactus.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“If the tweaks make Return to Paradise sound uncomfortably different to the rest of the cosy crime franchise, then regular fans should rest assured. It’s entirely familiar. There was even a cameo from Ardal O’Hanlon’s DI Jack Mooney. Between Death in Paradise and its twin spin-offs, the BBC now has 20 weeks’ worth of dependably popular primetime TV drama. Happily, the formula comes up fresh enough so that Return to Paradise doesn’t feel like too much of a good thing.”
Gerard Gilbert, The i

“I cannot tell you who this programme is for, why anyone thought it was necessary and what it’s doing on Channel 4 in particular. But it happens a lot – sweeping the cutting room floor and putting scraps of things together to make a new programme that is as old as time. I guess it’s cheap? But does cheap always have to be dull and pointless? And always about the royals or aristocrats? And always about stuff that has only just happened to them, stuff we all remember because it happened almost literally yesterday? That time has neither obscured or yet lent an air of mystery to? I mean what, really, is the point?”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Channel 4 wanted to deflate the Queen’s balloon but rather fell flat on its own face, descending into Saturday night on Channel 5 territory: talking heads rehashing the same old archive cuts job over a cliché-laden narrative about the 1981 ‘fairytale’, Charles’s affair with the ‘woman from Wiltshire’ and PR efforts to rehabilitate Camilla’s image. With few killer insights, there was too much nudging and winking about not very much.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“The question mark on the end of Queen Camilla: The Wicked Stepmother? was an indication that the programme was just one of those royal documentaries commissioned to fill space and keep Jennie Bond off the streets.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The Norwegian drama State Of Happiness takes all the winning elements of Dallas and infuses them with intelligence, trusting viewers to appreciate the technological complexity of the North Sea drilling industry and the political machinations that went with it.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Tsunami: Race Against Time, a four-part documentary that flies by, reshapes the catastrophe into an anthology of gripping stories, capturing the carnage and stirring, moving tales of survival. It is all extraordinarily harrowing – and the series gets as close to communicating the scale of the disaster as possible.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian