Katie Price: Nothing To Hide; Silo

“Price’s frankness is a boon when providing colourful accounts of certain subjects, such as moving into the Playboy mansion after being paid £250,000 to appear on the magazine’s cover. Three times a week, she explains, the girls would convene in the magazine mogul’s bedroom, which was strewn with sex toys and had porn films playing on a big screen. “I remember just seeing them climb aboard naked Hugh Hefner,” she says of the other girls. Price had turned down the opportunity to become one of his girlfriends “because I thought it would be like having sex with my grandad”. This level of candour is par for the course with Price, but it doesn’t mean that we’re getting the full picture. She has commodified her life to the point where everything is content. As with similar – albeit glossier – documentaries about the Beckhams, it’s all part of the brand.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“The challenge for a documentary like Katie Price: Nothing to Hide lies in saying something bigger about celebrity culture in Britain, the exploitation of young girls, and how that has evolved in the internet age. From the episodes made available to critics (the third and fourth episodes were unavailable prior to broadcast), Wivell favours intimacy over grander points. This misses a trick. “When Lady Diana died, there was a hole in the paper for things, and so Kate filled it,” reveals Jeany Savage, a legendary glamour mag photographer. But the show stops short of inspecting the forces in play during that transition to a relentlessly pornographised, voyeuristic celebrity culture. It puts the onus on its subject. And while Price is charismatic and her story full of shock value and cautionary tales, it feels like a parochial entertainment, replicating some of the leering quality of Noughties tabloid journalism, rather than the social history it might’ve been.”
Nick Hilton, The Independent

“Somewhere in the seventh hour of subterranean arguments one may be tempted to sigh “Get on with it”, but there are standout moments throughout whenever “the Algorithm”, a sinister AI entity, calmly manipulates Camille, the conflicted head of IT (Alexandria Riley, her role now central to the plot), to carry out terrible acts. Repressive state control to keep the masses docile in their ignorance — yes, this is the kind of series that, were he alive, Marx might consider getting an Apple subscription to watch. And this time we really do find out the truth about the creation of the silos. You have to get to the finale, but it’s an excellent, head-twisting episode, setting up a game of Orwellian chess in the final series ahead. For all its murky longueurs, Silo is a show full of ambitious and fascinating ideas.”
James Jackson, The Times

“You’d say the series had a steampunk vibe, but both steam and punk suggest ferocious energy and Silo is murky and suffocating, so it doesn’t sit right. Condensation folk? Mildew emo? Anyway, the bunker people struggle to find the lighter side of living under artificial light and, as one greeny-grey episode grinds into the next, the standard Silo plotline involves the proletariat, who are confined to the bottom levels of the big underground tube – literally the lower classes – staging a rebellion having suspected that the upper echelons are deceiving them. Each attempt at revolution involves trying to climb one more flight of spiral stairs than the law allows.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“Silo has taken a risk by weaving in a parallel storyline, as it means less of Ferguson on screen – and viewers may initially struggle to see a connection between the two settings. But the flashbacks are fast-moving and paranoia-soaked in the tradition of the best political potboilers. There’s a great cliffhanger ending, too, that sets things up for a fourth and final season (filmed back-to-back with series three). Overlooked amid a glut of inferior television, the time is long overdue for this subterranean romp to be lifted out of obscurity and given its moment in the spotlight.”
Ed Power, Telegraph