The Love Box in Your Living Room; Lost Worlds with Ben Fogle

“Considering this is a BBC show, made by comedians very much employed by the BBC, and purports to celebrate the history, or at least a history, of the BBC, it has a healthy disdain for lots of parts of the BBC. It has a pop at its labyrinthine bureaucracy, its privately educated overlords and its tricky history with employing women, apart from Joan Bakewell. But it scatters its mockery around with equal measure: New Labour gets as much of a pasting as “Porridge Johnson”, while Pride & Prejudice is used as a jumping off point to lampoon ITV’s Downton Abbey. But as much as it skewers its host (“The BBC didn’t know anyone working class, because it was like a giant public school”), it is also a love letter to it. It might be a barbed one, written after many decades of marriage, weary with the routine familiarity of it all, but there’s no hiding its affection and love.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“Some of the one-liners would be funny in any era. I snorted with laughter at the dalek who, during a break in filming, croaked at the director: ‘Have-I-Got-Time-To-Pop-Out-For-A-Fag?’ And you didn’t need to be a fan of Peaky Blinders or Downton Abbey to enjoy the skit where the Shelby brothers burst into the drawing room and beat seven bells out of Carson the butler.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“When organisations celebrate their anniversaries you can usually expect a dull circle jerk of self-congratulation, so the BBC played a blinder in getting Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse to do it for them. Patting yourself on the back looks better when you send yourself up. The Love Box in Your Living Room was a tour de force, an ingenious, quickfire, sometimes hilarious mockumentary and a tender love letter to the BBC.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“A large part of the point of The Love Box in Your Living Room, a spoof history of the BBC by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, was that it was being shown on the BBC at all. Only an organisation in the rudest of health, concrete-sure of itself, its 100-year past and its boundless future, would allow a satirist like Enfield free rein to tear into his host. It was a bit like one of those comedy roasts where the miffed roastee is in fact parading their broad-mindedness at submitting themselves to a roasting in the first place. But then Love Box was a bit like a lot of things. It was a bit like giving camcorders to primary school kids who’d been fed hallucinogens and displaying the results on the Piccadilly Circus videowall. Occasionally it veered close to genius. Often it just veered.”
Benji Wilson, Telegraph

“Detroit might not instantly spring to mind when you think of “lost worlds”, but from the first shocking minutes of Lost Worlds with Ben Fogle parts of it were presented like a war zone.”
Carol Midgley, The Times