Being Gordon Ramsay; The Tony Blair Story

“Six hours of advertising yourself on Netflix and – presumably – getting paid for providing streamer content at the same time? Nice work if you can get it, and Gordon Ramsay has got it. Being Gordon Ramsay, a six part – six part – documentary, follows the chef ’n’ TV personality as he embarks on his most ambitious venture yet. It’s “A huge undertaking”, “high risk, high reward”, a “once in a lifetime opportunity” and “one of my final stakes in the ground … If it fails, I’m fucked.” It is opening seven billion (five, but it feels like seven billion) restaurants on the top floors of 22 Bishopsgate at once.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“This was really an elongated ad for Ramsay’s new Bishopsgate venture and the wider empire, but it did show him as a human whirlwind — a man who thrives on intense pressure when he must be easily rich enough to retire in luxury now. His dysfunctional upbringing and brother’s addiction to heroin seem to drive Ramsay on, the threat constantly at his shoulder that if he doesn’t keep working it could all disappear. In that he is an interesting psychological study.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“There is something for everyone in Being Gordon Ramsay (Netflix), a surprisingly enjoyable new series. It offers an insight into the hospitality business, a psychological study of a man driven to launch yet more restaurants despite already having 95 of them, and the chance to follow Ramsay’s latest project through various Grand Designs-style calamities. And if you’re interested in the soap opera involving the in-laws, there’s a flicker of that too. While it is nakedly an advert for his newest venture, this six-parter feels less fake than similar offerings from his good friends, the Beckhams.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“Episode one of Michael Waldman’s new three-part biography bears the subtitle “Who Are You?”. As well as the normal business of harvesting archive clips and interviewing his subject’s colleagues and rivals to build a picture of past events, Waldman has gained interviews with Tony Blair, his wife, Cherie, and several of their children in an effort to capture the character of the politician who was re-elected twice as British prime minister. The question is: what sort of man is Blair? It is an approach that many political film-makers find impossible to resist. Detailed factual arguments can get boring, and overarching theses about the power structures that lift politicians into place would take too long to explain. But a narrative based on an individual’s psychology, where major events happen because a personality has imposed itself on the world? That is a source of readily relatable drama.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“Blair still does present like a weighty statesman, if we exclude the clip after lockdown when he had grown his hair long and looked terrible. We could call this his “Bob from Twin Peaks” era. Cherie admitted that towards the end, after “ten years living in the goldfish bowl”, you do “kind of lose contact with reality”. It was theorised that Blair’s “tragedy” is that his many achievements are blotted out by his mistakes. But Andrew Neil said Blair was “an integral part of a golden age in Britain” which he believes a lot of people wish we were back in now “because we sure ain’t in a golden age today”.
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Tony Blair is interviewed for four hours in The Tony Blair Story, but to understand where he is today you don’t have to listen to a word he says. The documentary’s quiet trick is to keep the camera on Blair’s face when he thinks he is no longer being filmed. The smile disappears. The face falls. At other moments, he rearranges his features into a bright expression, a rictus grin. For all the self-assurance he tries to project, he is, in these glimpses, a picture of unease. All Blair ever wanted was to be remembered as one of the most successful and visionary leaders in modern political history. It’s how he still sees himself. Instead, he is the man who took Britain into the Iraq War. As the writer Robert Harris suggests, the “tragedy” for Blair is that his achievements have been blotted out by a single mistake. On screen, the former prime minister appears both anxious about his legacy and faintly irritated that he must keep reminding us of his greatness.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph