John and Joe Bishop: Life After Deaf; My Grandparents’ War; Westminster Abbey: Behind Closed Doors

“It was immediately obvious how much he loves his son and how valuable this documentary would be. Not just because it showed them learning sign language together, thus helping to normalise a skill we should all have a bit of, but because it showed, to use the cringiest TV term, a “journey”, with Bishop arriving at an important truth.” 
Carol Midgley, The Times

“The real subject is the evocation and the beginning – just the beginning, but all the more moving for that – of those experiences. The programme becomes a study not just of a family’s dynamic but of wider cultural attitudes, of how much of disability is socially constructed and how much power we have to embrace or reject different messages.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian 

”The wartime service of Knightley’s ancestors — including a grandfather who fought in the Norwegian campaign and a great-uncle killed in the Battle of the Java Sea — was obviously important, but unfortunately ancestry TV programmes do become a sort of Top Trumps.” 
Carol Midgley, The Times

“It is striking, in this time of emotional over-sharing, to see how different our approach used to be. Knightley’s grandfather, Joseph “Mac” Macdonald, lost his younger brother…Reading of Wilf’s death reduced Knightley to tears, in what was the most poignant moment of the programme.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph 

“It still felt a little strange to hear someone referring to the Commonwealth Day service in March as “about as big as events get in the Abbey.” Still, there was nothing here in bad taste. It is one of those jolly series that Channel 5 turns out with regularity – Inside the Tower of London was another, and Kensington Palace: Behind Closed Doors – in which we meet the good-natured, hard-working people who keep the wheels turning. Here they included Mantas Nemcausakas and his team, whose job involves laying out 2,000 chairs for the Abbey’s grandest services. At the late Queen’s funeral, we saw the guests seated in the Abbey, but I doubt it occurred to many of us to think about the vital backroom staff who had made the seating arrangements.” 
Anita Singh, The Telegraph