Noel Edmonds’ Kiwi Adventure; Grenfell: Uncovered

“Edmonds is a film-maker’s dream. But he can also be, let’s be honest, a massive tit. What he is clearly trying to be is New Zealand’s Jeremy Clarkson with a Clarkson’s Farm-type show. I admire him for this effort and for providing local jobs even if he hasn’t always been popular with the locals. But, good Lord, he can grate. He reminds me of a schoolboy placing whoopee cushions under your bottom seven days a week.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“He remains unassailably himself – emotional, childlike, open, confident and professional. If you were anything other than a wholly committed hater of the man before, you will follow him just as willingly as you did decades ago, this time through bad Kiwi weather instead of ill-fated proposals, money troubles instead of swaps, and chaos caused by tabloids instead of Mr Blobby.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Never one to knowingly undersell himself, Noel Edmonds has been busily promoting his show as the new Clarkson’s Farm. Having watched it all, I can tell you that this would only be true if Jeremy Clarkson abandoned all self-knowledge and spent every episode behaving like a complete prat, while sharing a shedload of pseudo-scientific woo-woo.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The question this funny yet ultimately exhausting show never broaches is whether Edmonds is in on the joke. Can he truly be that lacking in self-awareness? And if he isn’t consciously sending himself up, is it fair of ITV to poke fun at a seemingly oblivious 76-year-old? After a while, I started to wonder if we weren’t just guffawing at a man of a certain age who doesn’t understand that he is the punchline. There is a thread of cruelty running through Kiwi Adventure that becomes hard to ignore.”
Ed Power, The i

“Grenfell: Uncovered lasts 100 minutes and every one of them is rage-inducing. Netflix’s analysis of the disaster of 2017 in which 72 people died thanks to dishonesty, incompetence, cynicism and greed is a forensic, muscular piece of work that drives home the scarcely believable truth that all those people died horrific, terrifying, completely avoidable deaths — yet to date not a single person has been prosecuted.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“This is an excellent documentary, and credit should be given to Netflix for commissioning it. It is well known in telly circles that these are dire times for documentary film-makers. Big streamers, the line goes, want to steer clear of politics, instead opting for big, user-friendly series, ideally involving gruesome historical crimes about which we can speculate to our hearts’ content. Grenfell Uncovered is not that. Not only is it a one-off film, foregoing the subscription catnip of a series for a more powerful one-shot format, but it also goes for the jugular.”
Benji Wilson, The Telegraph

“From Arconic to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, via the London Fire Brigade and David Cameron’s war on regulations, Grenfell: Uncovered doesn’t pull its punches when identifying collaborators in the needless deaths of 72 Londoners. For those who have been plugged into the news cycle over the past eight years, the stories will be familiar and possibly too harrowing to return to. But rather than simply offering another affecting tribute, the film proves willing to play the blame game. Much of what went wrong at Grenfell, it concludes, was a failure to learn the lessons of the past, and this, therefore, is something we cannot let happen again.”
Nick Hilton, The Independent