This Is a Gardening Show; Race Across The World; Stranger Things: Tales from ’85

“I wonder what people like my dad – whose shelves are lined with gardening books, and who loves nothing more than to get lost in the weeds of specific gardening techniques – will make of This Is a Gardening Show. Something tells me it won’t be for them. This might prove to be a little too entry level. And that’s fine, because Gardeners’ World still exists. And it’s a perfectly good series. Even I eventually aged into appreciating it. But for novices, This Is a Gardening Show is perfect. It’s funny, looks beautiful and brims with such unalloyed enthusiasm that you can’t help but fall in line. I’m already making plans to show this to my kids. If it lands as hard as I think it will, the next generation of gardeners starts here.”
Stuart Heritage, The Guardian

“The style of This is a Gardening Show echoes its message. It is free-wheeling and lo-fi, full of what elsewhere would be called bloopers but here constitute endearing imperfections. Sometimes you can get to the 10th minute of a 15-minute episode and realise that he’s barely even talked about say, compost, which is the episode’s title and purported subject. It doesn’t matter. The tastiest fruits are often the ones that look a little funny. This is a Gardening Show is TV from the farmers’ market, not the supermarket. the supermarket.”
Benji Wilson, Telegraph

“Perhaps most impressive of all the sights was the city of Akhaltsikhe, guarded by an ancient fortress with a mosque, a church and a synagogue within its walls. The plan was evidently for widower Mark and his sister-in-law Margo to tour its ramparts. But Mark spent the day in bed with what he called T.T.s or ‘tummy troubles’, and without his moral influence, giddy Margo went for a liquid lunch instead. Three brimming glasses of Georgian wine and a ‘homemade cognac’ later, she was in danger of breaking the show’s prohibition on flying. Well, if you can’t overdo it abroad, when can you?”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Stranger Things takes us back to simpler times. The original Netflix series plonked us in a fantasy past where kids in small American towns rode bikes, chewed gum, listened to cassettes and played Dungeons and Dragons in their friend’s basement; or, if you weren’t American, it reminded you of movies you’d seen where that was the vibe. Either way, it was access to an era before the internet, 9/11, the banking crash, the pandemic and Trump, when life seemed easier. The cartoon spin-off Tales from ’85 does something similar for Stranger Things itself. It rewinds to a happy, straightforward time, namely between seasons two and three. In that moment, the world of Hawkins, Indiana had been established, but we were yet to endure the show’s bumpy late period, when it got long and boring, then supersized itself and became breathtakingly spectacular, then lost control of the monster it had created and became both spectacular and boring at the same time.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian