Call the Midwife; Heated Rivalry; Casualty

“When I read that Call the Midwife (BBC1) would be tackling women’s lib and bra-burning I had visions of Jenny Agutter (as Sister Julienne) whipping off her Playtex Cross Your Heart and flinging it into a brazier. Alas we were denied that pleasure but at least got to see her eyebrows rise as she read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. What a corker of an episode this was, ranging seamlessly from dry wit to darkest misery and back again.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“The redoubtable nuns and midwives of Nonnatus House were never shrinking violets, but it’s serious stuff now, with a copy of The Female Eunuch being passed around and finding the most unlikely of cheerleaders. Those delightful late-middle-aged friends Phyllis and Millicent (that’s Miss Higgins to you and everyone else) – played by the programme’s most reliably excellent actors, Linda Bassett and Georgie Glen – hunker down for a startlingly frank chat.”
Fiona Mountford, The i

“The recent Christmas specials followed a mercy mission to Hong Kong with middling results. This return to home turf also represents a return to form. With its Morris Travellers, Jif Lemon-topped pancakes, Joan Baez folk songs and glimpses of the Test Card Girl, it positively crackled and glowed with nostalgia. And I don’t just mean the flames rising from those bullet brassieres. After 15 series, Call the Midwife can still delight and surprise.”
Michael Hogan, Telegraph

“Heated Rivalry has a lot of sex in it. Specifically, sex between men. Even more specifically, sex between young men who are ice hockey stars and bitter rivals on the rink but irresistibly drawn to each other off it. They are Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a golden child whose talent has been nurtured by fond parents from the get-go and whose mother is his manager, signing him up for more lucrative brand deals and commercial shoots every time he sits down for a rest; and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), a product of the more brutal Soviet system, whose mother is gone, whose father drives his son relentlessly for the glory of Russia and whose brother is a feckless waster, sponging off his sibling while also despising him for being gay. But in any romance – and however explicitly decorated, this is what Heated Rivalry remains, like the Game Changers books by Rachel Reid on which it is based – opposites attract and soon Shane and Ilya are at it like knives. Knives with fancy hotel rooms, perfect bottoms and legs and pieces of furniture perfectly placed at all times to obscure anything that would prevent the sale of Heated Rivalry to international markets.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“It’s a lustful Canadian melodrama in which, every few minutes, attractive young men with impressive abs strip off and go at it. Imagine if the locker room scenes in Top Gun were about 50 per cent more gay, and you’re there. This all sounds very adult, but the storytelling is at the teenage drama level. And the acting, from some cast members, is at the daytime soap level. That’s okay. Heated Rivalry is not to be taken terribly seriously, despite all the po-faced think pieces it has spawned on the other side of the Atlantic about the depiction of gay sexuality.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“Director Sean Healy did a well-controlled job of portraying A&E as a whirling mosh pit of the walking wounded, drunks, chronically ill patients and the homeless. ‘Is it always like this?’ a bewildered Matty asked Nurse Jodie Whyte (Anna Chell). ‘Sometimes it’s busy,’ she retorted. For all the modern changes, actors playing doctors and nurses will always want to … well, play Doctors and Nurses.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail