“It is an excellent documentary, made with care and respect, and a worthy memorial”
“It is an excellent documentary, made with care and respect, and a worthy memorial. It sets the scene by describing Bradford’s decline from centre of the wool trade to a city of poverty and hardship. “A lot of once-magnificent thoroughfares turning to s–t, basically”, said Jim Greenhalf, a venerable Telegraph & Argus journalist who deftly contextualised what Bradford City’s soaring fortunes that season meant to local people.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph
“Perhaps the film’s most memorable sequence arrives when we watch television coverage of the game, which soon becomes a report on the fire, in the company of fire safety expert Ben Hanney. He commentates on the pictures, which are timecoded so we can see the sheer speed of the developing catastrophe. Hanney points out behaviours that seem odd with hindsight but are just human nature: fans initially stand watching the flames, rapt or amused; then they panic when they appreciate the danger, with no middle phase in between. The shortness of the time that elapses between minor incident and major disaster is wholly terrifying.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian
“Some traditional TV interviews feel stale largely because you get the impression that the celebrities’ main goal is to not really answer any questions if they can help it. Or that their answers have been workshopped and beigeified to death. That is certainly the case with bland political interviews. But there is a candour, openness and a vague frisson of danger about this show, which can veer from the sad to the strange on a sixpence — one minute Lineker is being asked about his son having leukaemia as a baby and the next he is being offered a limp, half-melted chocolate bar as a gift (“Sorry, I sweat easily in these pants”).”
Carol Midgley, The Times
A Life Among Elephants, Channel 4
When Saba and Dudu Douglas-Hamilton were growing up in Uganda, they lived in a derelict house on the banks of the Nile that was once a lodge used by Queen Elizabeth. It had no windows or doors. Every night, their parents, Iain and Oria, ‘shoved a safari chair into the door to keep the hyenas out’. When the girls bathed in the river, their father stood guard with an AK-47 assault rifle, in case of crocodiles. ‘It was just so marvellous,’ grinned Saba, on A Life Among Elephants. ‘So exciting.’ ‘Marvellous and exciting’ sums up the entire documentary, charting the life’s work of Iain and Oria, whose research into the behaviour of elephants became a fearless campaign against the poachers who threatened to drive their beloved animals into extinction.
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail
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