Crossfire; Andor; Cunk on Earth; Michael Palin: Into Iraq

“There is – but of course – a tension pneumothorax in the kitchen and one of the couple-women, who is a doctor, has to sort it out with an eggbeater and a mixed grill. Sometimes there are flashbacks, not in corridors but still very boring. They tend to show how the friends ended up together at the resort. Every episode is bookended by Jo musing in voiceover on the nature of time, traumatic events, fate and free will. It makes you long to get back to the corridors.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian 

“It was an often nail-biting choreography of hide-and-seek terror as unknown assailants stalked barely known protagonists around corridors and poolside sunloungers (turn those phones to silent!)…It was well directed, too, although troublingly the terrorist scenes evoked real-life atrocities a little too closely.”
James Jackson, The Times

“Crossfire might as well be called My Family And Other Massacres. It’s an odd and awkward thriller, an action adventure bolted on to a domestic civil war.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“It is awful to watch, for two main reasons. Reason one: this is horrible, stressful television. The terrorists storm the pool at this family resort and begin murdering people. Terrified, panicking children scream for their parents. Terrified, panicking parents scream for their children. Bodies fall around them. Why would you want to watch this? It is clearly inspired by the attack on a hotel in Tunisia in 2015, which left 38 people dead, and the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which claimed 166 victims. This is the world of television, where even the grimmest events prompt people to think: “Could this win me a Bafta? It is nightmarish…The supporting cast is good, particularly Josette Simon as Miriam the GP. But that’s about it”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph 

“It also does surreal so well that Cunk’s questions occasionally prompt genuinely thoughtful and contemplative answers. You can tell that the philosophy professor is champing at the bit to go off on one when she asks him an oddly beautiful question about “mind pipes”, and he does not disappoint. If there’s another thing I learned from Cunk on Earth, aside from the fact about the Great Wall of China, it’s that pretty much everyone is capable of blagging an answer, even if the question is largely, to use the technical term, a load of bollocks. If viewers have an appetite for self-anointed experts talking drivel and taking themselves too seriously, well, insert your own “Programme With GB/Britain in the Title joke” here. By now, TV audiences are used to inane interviews that ultimately reveal nothing of worth or use, and Richard Madeley isn’t even trying to be funny. Obviously, Philomena Cunk is a comical work of fiction, but it can provide a pleasant if brief sense of relief just to remind yourself that she’s not real, after all.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“Her grandiose, meaningless proclamations, bellowed to camera from mountaintops and glaciers in Cunk On Earth (BBC2), are wickedly funny send-ups of a certain sort of TV egotist. When Cunk first appeared on Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, some of her interviewees took her stupidity seriously, which made it all the funnier. Now everyone’s in on the joke, and instead we get the joy of watching Oxbridge historians trying to suppress fits of the giggles as they answer her magnificently dim-witted questions. In this history of human civilisation, there’s a delightful cleverness about some of her idiocies. ”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Luna’s bad-boy scowl was one of the big draws in Rogue One, his edgy vibe brought to mind Han Solo with the safety cap off. That energy has survived the light-speed jump to Disney+. Taking that bleak aura as its cue, Andor goes where no Star Wars has ventured previously. This is established when the first episode opens with our hero visiting a brothel in search of his missing sister. For the dress-up-as-a-Storm Trooper contingent of the fanbase – no, this isn’t the innocent escapism you’re looking for. Luna is a coiled spring throughout and Andor as a whole is bunched up with a tension which, in the first four episodes at least, is never fully unleashed. But the new series isn’t an insult to the original movies and – set against the recent track record – what a scintillating improvement that represents.”
Ed Power, The Telegraph

“In truth it feels less like a picturesque profile of a river than a line to follow on a map which took him to places where stories cluster: in this first episode, the story of Kurdish identity, or of life with and after Islamic State. Any journey with Palin is also to some extent a portrait of the man. You’d get a harder-nosed narrative from a different reporter. While Palin doesn’t altogether shy away from these subjects, there would probably be more on corruption, torture and endemic sexism. But you wouldn’t get the warmth, the self-mockery, the granddad jokes, or the conversation with a donkey, which was no more talkative than that parrot he once sold to John Cleese. The capacity to connect across chasms was seen to best effect when he encountered some kids playing in the strafed ruins of Mosul. “It’s their innocence,” he mused. “They didn’t do all this, they just suffered it.” Their cheerfulness in such a place at such a time reduced him to Anglo-Saxon. “F— me,” he blurted, which may be a first.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph