John Simpson: 60 Years at the BBC; VisionQuest

“John Simpson: 60 Years At The BBC was a celebration of his long and action-packed career. He’s been shot at, tortured by Palestinians, bombed by the American air force, sacked as a newsreader, battered by supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, and — perhaps worse — he had to look on politely as Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi constantly broke wind during an interview. As a young political editor, he tried to shout a question at Harold Wilson about rumours of a forthcoming election. He got as far as ‘Excuse me, Prime Minister’ before Wilson punched him hard in the stomach. Can you imagine what would happen if Andy Burnham adopted the same media strategy? Yet back then the Downing Street press pack didn’t even think it was a story. ‘You can’t ask the PM questions,’ they said snootily.”
Roland White, Daily Mail

“An ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil was elegantly remembered. He hoped to take a polite sip of the hallucinogen but was handed a “whopping great cup” that he felt obliged to imbibe, prompting a vision of a 6ft goldfish with a straw hat on putting its hand round Simpson’s shoulder and asking, “How’s it going, man?” Given his status and salary, it seems to be going pretty well these days (he recently told The Times that he hopes to have another two or three years left working). Yet while his defence of public service news reporting “done by honourable people for honourable purposes” was inspiring, his closing chat with a young BBC reporter — designed to point optimistically to the future — still felt like an elegy to a lost age. Will there be a tribute to the next John Simpson in 60 years’ time? Will there even be a BBC?”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“All bad things must come to an end, or so Marvel has concluded, with its stonkingly OK-ish Disney+ caper, VisionQuest, marking the tailing off of a largely disastrous attempt to parlay the success of its superhero movies to the small screen. The series, in which Paul Bettany reprises his role as the high-flying, perpetually angsty man-machine Vision, represents the emptying of the superhero cupboard by Marvel and Disney. With the exception of the third and final season of Daredevil: Born Again and the newly announced Zodiac, no new live-action shows are planned for the foreseeable. Viewer apathy has done something beyond the power of the galaxy’s mightiest villains. It has – for the meantime at least – banished the “MCU” from our televisions. The small-screen Marvel universe hasn’t been uniformly terrible. But quality control went through the floor the more Disney tried to flog this exhausted nag for all it was worth. In that context, VisionQuest is an unexpected 90th-minute comeback. It isn’t uniformly atrocious, and is significantly better than the worst of the Marvel shows, most of which have vanished down a collective memory hole never to be thought of again.”
Ed Power, Telegraph

“VisionQuest is sometimes entertaining and always clever, yet if it does have anything to say about human nature, it is drowned out by dizzying plot particulars and the need for a big brawl every episode. Yet what’s really missing is actual jeopardy: it turns out to be quite difficult to emotionally invest in lines of code that exist in the “head” of an android. This isn’t dumb, mindless entertainment, but VisionQuest is still closer to the Big Dipper than GoodFellas.”
Rachel Aroesti, The Guardian