Holly Willoughby Together (With Voy); The Vampire Lestat; Cold Case Forensics: The Death of God’s Banker

“The best moments come when she stops trying to violently rebrand herself and just allows herself to be quick, funny and endearingly nervous about her new venture. The bits where she seems most like her true self, like when she teasingly provokes Tucci’s culinary sensibilities with microwavable Rustlers, have energy and charm in equal amounts. If that can be sustained over the coming episodes, audiences will naturally find her. The plan seems to be to keep Holly Willoughby Together (With Voy) going as long as possible, in which case it will almost certainly start to become the thing it wants to be as episodes progress. Let’s cross our fingers that it wants to be 15 minutes shorter than it currently is, because plenty could be trimmed from its 45-minute duration. For instance, there is an interminable section near the start where Willoughby painstakingly slices four courgettes with all the concentration of someone trying to defuse a nuclear bomb. It is not essential viewing. But you can’t help but root for the show.”
Stuart Heritage, The Guardian

“How bad is Holly Willoughby’s new YouTube show? I don’t know where to start. But I do know where it should end – at the half-hour mark, when she and Stanley Tucci are so stuck for conversation that they end up reading out the ingredients list of a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie. Or let me put it another way. Come back, Meghan, all is forgiven.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“Around the halfway mark, Together starts to elicit the same soporific effect as a bowl of spag bol (or as is proper in Italian culture, according to Tucci, rigatoni bol). Willoughby’s voice and his lilting laugh blend into one, as cutlery clinks and chimes in a sort of ASMR-y way. It’s not totally unpleasant. It’s even a little soothing if you close your eyes. But it’s not what you want from a breakfast show at 7am – and certainly it’s not the marker of an exciting new era for Willoughby.”
Annabel Nugent, Independent

“It starts with drums, heavily reverbed: da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA-CHA. Cheap, chugging electric guitars kick in. A song plays, and although it’s an original composition it is at least 60% Blockbuster by Sweet. What in the Tony Visconti is happening? This is meant to be season three of Interview with the Vampire! Has it turned into a glam-rock musical? Yes. Yes, it has. The show based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books – a text it is serially unfaithful to while remaining loyal to the source material’s essence, a camp melange of the sinister, sordid and the deeply, sincerely emotional – was previously set in a lush vision of the past, starting in New Orleans in 1910. There romanced the vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), a sensitive pupil and wild, brittle master whose tumultuous relationship was remembered in a second timeline set in 2022 during an interview with Louis conducted by the journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). At the close of season two, Molloy published the titular book.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“The Vampire Lestat has genuinely funny moments, such as when a spooked Lestat spies an edition of the recently published Interview with the Vampire in a bookshop and realises that his friend Louis (Jacob Anderson, in for 1994’s Brad Pitt) has been spilling the beans about their vampiric relationship. But it then gear-shifts unsatisfyingly into full-blown horror as the parched Lestat slakes his blood thirst by butchering a corridor full of innocents. There are also lots of tedious sex scenes – a staple of the milieu since Tony Scott’s The Hunger in 1983 had David Bowie playing a naughty Nosferatu. Haven’t we had enough erotic vampires romping around in tasteful nudity? Today, a truly subversive take would involve a prudish bloodsucker who blushed at the thought of biting a stranger without their permission.”
Ed Power, Telegraph

“True crime is all very well. But for fans of the Golden Age of detection, it can be a little mundane. Where are the eccentric geniuses, the feats of memory and imagination, the sheer Sherlockery? Meet Dr Angela Gallop. She’s a mistress of deduction in the classic mould, to the tips of her brilliantly varnished fingernails, their colours carefully matched to her clothes. She is also an internationally renowned forensic scientist, who has scrutinised some of the most notorious murders in recent criminal history. Cold Case Forensics: The Death Of God’s Banker is the first in a series that sees Dr Gallop reconstruct her investigations, walking us through every step of her analysis and explaining the clues that help her create a vivid mental picture of how each murder was committed. It’s like listening to Poirot’s thought process, before he gathers the suspects in the drawing room to unmask the killer.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail