“They endure grooming’n’girdle checks and weigh-ins before every flight, and a script as inert and useless as a grounded jet.” Read on for the verdict on last night’s TV.

Pan Am

Pan Am, BBC2

“The story-lines are so silly (one of the women was recruited as a spy in the first episode) and the characterisation so shallow (we know that Maggie is brainy because she exchanges small talk about Hegelian dialectic with her beatnik roommate) that you’re unlikely to make it more than halfway through the first flight without wondering why it’s taking so long to get to the destination.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It tells the story of a group of women who – with the possible exception of designated sass-merchant Maggie Ryan – are apparently consumed by the earnest joy and weighty responsibility of being Pan American stewardesses. It’s like an airborne Malory Towers. “I am proud of my uniform!” cries one to her disapproving mother. “Do you know what we do?” They endure grooming’n’girdle checks and weigh-ins before every flight, and a script as inert and useless as a grounded jet.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“The fundamental problem is that nothing on board this clipper is written vividly enough. It is a lack of exemplified by the girls’ corset-flicking supervisor. Miss Havemeyer is a cartoon, and her creators are happy to leave her as one.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Unfortunately the writer of this story seems unable to take things on for 10 minutes without leaping back into the past, tipping us out of the aircraft into assorted family weddings and painful trysts in European hotel rooms.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“An essay on the American road movie it was enlivened by stylish direction (Hall filmed in the back of a truck, so that the landscape unrolled behind him), lateral thinking (I’ve never heard The Wizard of Oz compared to Apocalypse Now before) and Hall’s florid impatience with the failings of the world.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

Who Do You Think You Are?, BBC1

“This would have been a pedestrian set of revelations for even the most ordinary seeker after ancestral truth but for Steve Buscemi… I was expecting a history of cannibalism, bloodlines going back to Grendel’s mother and archival appearances by Silurian kings and the baby-eating Toad People of one of Cthulhu’s darker realms.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

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