The Fast and the Farmer-ish; Mega Mansion Hunters; Magpie Murders; President

“It is an extremely silly but strangely entertaining show, a sort of rustic, muddy Top Gear crossed with It’s a Knockout, in which two teams of no-nonsense country types from Somerset (the men) and Leicester (the women) race against each other on tractors around obstacle courses. And that’s about it. The BBC is hoping that this show will garner a cult following among the young now it has revived BBC3, and it’s so odd there’s a good chance it will.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“The Fast and the Farmer-ish is a post-industrial mash-up of It’s a Knockout and Total Wipeout. It is Robot Wars with barely more sentience or Top Gear with, at least in this episode, as much oestrogen as testosterone. It shows the British countryside is not the bucolic idyll evoked by Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan, but seethes with toxic fumes, sublimated rage, burning rubber, sexual tension and yokels in bad hair bawling supportively from the sidelines to their demented coevals. Can’t wait for the semi-finals.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“The Fast and the Farmer-ish actually has the Zeitgeist between the bit of its teeth. Farm-based binge-watching is all the rage, from Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon to Our Yorkshire Farm on Channel 5. Everywhere you look, the schedules are a riot of squelching wellies and rolling rustic vistas. Rural bliss was, alas, in short supply here. Try as he might, the enthusiastic host Tom Pemberton – a noted influencer in the Instagram farming community – couldn’t save the format. The Fast and the Farmer-ish worked hard at selling the joys of the rustic lifestyle to BBC Three’s Gen Z audience. But it ultimately felt like a muddy big waste of time.”
Ed Power, The Telegraph

“These wacky races look like games Jeremy Clarkson might have played in his Top Gear heyday. The competitors had to steer round obstacle courses while singing country hits, and use their vehicles to bowl tyres at sheds. The sight of a deeply embarrassed boy called Bucky trying to reverse a farm vehicle while belting out Shania Twain’s Man! I Feel Like A Woman was stupidly entertaining.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“This perplexingly dull programme seems unlikely to hook the young viewers the channel is courting. A love of tractors might have made The Fast and the Farmer-ish more interesting, but for those of us who care about them only a little, it was hard to feel anything but bored.”
Emily Watkins, The i

“Following bad-boy-turned-businessman Tyron Ash and his eponymous estate agents, Mega Mansion Hunters was delightfully down-at-heel and impossibly aspirational – a cursive Live, Laugh, Love sign come to life; Selling Sunset meets Towie. Reality TV with the faintest whiff of reality, the show didn’t just look like Instagram – it felt like scrolling through it too. If you don’t ask too much of it, Mega Mansion Hunters will return the favour and demand very little of you: highly filtered fun.”
Emily Watkins, The i

“From the manufactured arguments over bonuses to the ‘Brazilian bum lift’ or surgically enhanced buttocks flaunted by Sophie, 27, everything about the show was fake.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Magpie Murders is an elaborate, cryptic puzzle box, with constantly shifting pieces. It is a whodunit about whodunits within a whodunit. Occasionally it is maddening, but there is true satisfaction in watching the pieces of Horowitz’s puzzle click into place. Submit yourself to all of the tongue-in-cheek genre tomfoolery and it’s a terrific series with enough in-jokes to keep any armchair detective happy. In a grey TV landscape crammed with humdrum whodunits, Magpie Murders is a splash of vivid colour.”
Chris Bennion, The Telegraph

“Camilla Nielsson’s film had remarkable, intimate access to Chamisa’s campaign. It also showed, without commentary or interviews, but via events unfolding in real time, democracy being violated in plain sight. It showed people desperate for change and with a candidate promising exactly that, but who were impotent in the face of an inscrutable government machine. If you wanted a lesson in how fragile democracy is and how easily it can be trampled upon, this was it.”
Carol Midgley, The Times