Trailblazers; We Are Not Alone; Secrets of Playboy

“Isabella Bird is a personal hero of Ruby Wax’s, although why Melanie Brown and Emily Atack are here is glossed over. They are trailblazers, too? That’ll do. It doesn’t really matter, because together they make for entertaining company. Wax reminded viewers of her calibre as a TV host with last year’s When Ruby Met … retrospective, and she does have an uncanny ability to harness chaos at the same time as cause it. This makes her very watchable.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“It’s a random trio, and I’m not sure any of them qualify as trailblazers as per the programme’s title, but their dynamic works. Wax is the engine of the series but doesn’t dominate, because Brown has an equally strong personality. They all have a sense of mischief and a dry sense of humour. They get stuck into various activities – horse-riding, rock climbing, fly-fishing – but, while their larking about is fun to watch, what proves more interesting is the conversations between these women of different ages.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The show had the distinct whiff of Gordon, Gino and Fred about it — the scripted bants, the faux bickering, the affected competitiveness — which is unsurprising given that I’ve just read it was made by Gordon Ramsay’s production company. Thankfully, it was nowhere near as bad as that. This is mostly because, despite an annoying proliferation of high fives, the macho grandstanding was absent. Plus, at least Wax is funny.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“This three-parter flaunts all the weary cliches of Gordon Ramsay’s boys-own expeditions with Gino D’Acampo and Fred Sirieix. Take three celebs feigning a friendship, stick them in an oversize vehicle they can’t drive, send them riding and rock-climbing, engineer a couple of tense encounters with locals, make them eat and drink stomach-turning delicacies, and link it all up with heavily scripted vulgarities and sing-songs. The fake camaraderie here was especially grating, as it was painfully obvious that Mel, Ruby and Emily had nothing in common and no interest in each other.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Combined with the magnificent terrain and the oddities of America’s interior, the entertainment value of this three-episode show should have been a shoe-in. But the insistence on girly chat and comical timidity felt like misogyny masquerading as feminism. Wax and Brown have an OBE and an MBE between them, and Atack is a successful comedian in a male-dominated industry. All three women could be seen as feminist trailblazers, yet little of their prowess was on display here.”
Francesca Steele, The i

“It’s a decent midweek watch, and Declan Baxter is charming as the bewildered lead. The problem is that the central gag – aliens in a mundane British setting – wears thin quite quickly, and the writers are left casting around for a plot to keep things moving.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Any comedy about spaceships and extraterrestrials needs to be bold and innovative, because the brilliant Red Dwarf has been doing these jokes so well for so long. But even the title, We Are Not Alone, lacked imagination. Vicki Pepperdine and Mike Wozniak, in blue wigs and Doctor Who prosthetics, tried their darndest with the premise. But jokes that were funny the first time were beaten flat with repetition.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Secrets of Playboy, a workaday trawl through the history of Hugh Hefner and his noxious fantasy world, worked best as a repeated jab in the ribs: every bit of archive footage from the mansion basically asked ‘How was this ever okay?’ It’s shocking, really, that it takes a distance of decades for the culture to conclude that what was sold as some kind of aspirational Xanadu was just another example of women being systematically demeaned for the benefit of men.”
Benji Wilson, The Telegraph