TV critics' verdict on programmes including last night’s episode of BBC1 period drama Cranford, broadcast between the 7 December and the 9 December 2007.

Cranford, BBC1
“Examined in its individual parts, Cranford really looks rather crummy. But when they’re put together, somehow, it’s a show that gladdens the heart.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

Cranford, BBC1
“The patchwork-quilt construction of the thing has been showing a bit more obviously in recent episodes [ -] but it’s still delightful.”
Thomas Sutcliffe, The Independent

Cranford, BBC1
“The gentle working through of a single idea [ -] is what I love most about Heidi Thomas’s screenplays. Or it would be were the dialogue not so blissful [ -] Ms Thomas writes with a fine, clear hand, as her characters would say.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

Boys Who Do: Comedy, BBC1
 “There’s nothing most male comics like doing better than talking about themselves, especially to a woman who giggles all the time.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

Robin Hood, BBC1
“ -the second series of Robin Hood is much better than the first. Well, it certainly needed to be.”
James Walton, Daily Telegraph

South Bank Show, ITV1
“Melvyn Bragg optimistically described what we saw as “a journey” - although to the untrained eye it more closely resembled a lot of dull rehearsing for a pretty dreadful vanity project.”
James Walton, Daily Telegraph

Tittybangbang, BBC3
“ -like later series of Little Britain, Tittybangbang seems content to shock rather than amuse.”
Abi Grant, Daily Telegraph

This is Civilisation, C4
 “You have a very rare thing: a likeable intellectual - neither sonorous nor pompous, not dumbed-down, and unabashed.”
Zoe Wiliams, The Guardian

The Company, BBC2
“The Company was a stylish programme. It dripped with style: the casting was stylish, the plotting was stylish, the subject was stylish, the lighting was so stylish that at one point I mistook a door for Michael Keaton.”
Zoe Williams, The Guardian

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