TV Critics: Miniature Britain; Weight Loss Ward; The Town; Rome; The Hour

“Although presenter George McGavin and cameraman Emilien Leonhardt were nominally in charge of proceedings, it was the camera that was the undoubted star of the show. We just didn’t get quite enough of it. Had this been made as a close-up film of the natural world with George just doing the voiceover, it would have been stunning, as there were plenty of memorable sequences, not least the water bears who can survive the radiation and vacuum of space and the phytoplankton at the bottom of the marine food chain. As it was, it all felt a bit disconnected and distracting.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“As uncomplicated as a Victorian lantern lecture but none the worse for that really. There are wonders in a drop of water.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Too many documentaries are too proud of their computer skills, often allowing ‘the story of how we got this amazing footage’ to overtake ‘the sight of this beautiful creature’. I’ll make an exception for Miniature Britain because without its special camera it couldn’t have opened up such a world of beauty and wonder… Nature programming is at its best when it doesn’t just expect viewers to coo and gasp. Underpinning all of these startling close-ups was a theory, or rather an overarching theme, from McGavin, namely the bigger stuff is, the more dependent it is on microscopic systems underpinning it.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Weight Loss Ward was good on the self-deceit of food addiction, but somewhat lacking in perspective. While the doctors and nurses came across as never less than caring, their insistence on the over-medicalisation of obesity seemed unconvincing.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“Deborah, readying herself for gastric sleeve surgery that would remove seven-eighths of her stomach permanently, was hoping to lose the weight of a full-grown man. And Terry Gardner – who weighed 47 stone when the filming began and could no longer fit into his own bathroom – appeared to be hellbent on finding out just how big you can grow a man to be. The critical bit of the treatment doesn’t appear to involve a scalpel, and consists in cutting out the only kind of denial that some of these people exercise, which is denying to themselves that they have any responsibility for how they’ve ended up.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Small towns can be claustrophobic, but Renton makes Seahaven in The Truman Show look like the open prairie. What Mike Bartlett has constructed here is a fairytale world of collusion, into which Mark has returned with the unforgiving eye of an outsider.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“There are many shouty presenters to be found on TV, but none with the decibel level of Simon Sebag Montefiore. Even if I turn the remote to mute, I can still hear him. At least what he has to say is interesting, though, as his series continues to be consistently informative, while slightly offbeat.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“The Hour has disappointed for so long and so consistently that it took a while to realize last night’s episode was quite pleasurable… Sadly Bel, for all her tight suits, is as dreary and self-righteous as ever, with Romola Garai declaiming where she should be emoting, and Ben Wishaw’s Freddie really needs a spell on a provincial weekly to learn the first thing about journalism.”
Andrew Billen, The Times