Unbreakable; Jon Richardson: Take My Mother-in-Law; My Grandparent’s War

“The show is cheerfully hosted by Rob Beckett, who’s all teeth, specs and quips, but even he struggles to jolly things along for a slow hour fattened out with pep talks, post mortems and quite a dire getting-to-know-you banquet. With two relationship experts as pitch-side commentators, we’re firmly in the feelings-first therapy zone of couples counselling, but with a side order of It’s a Knockout. It’s extraordinarily odd.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“Unfortunately, most of the contestants were so desperately dull it felt like being trapped on a weekend retreat run by the Golf Club Bores Association. You sense the researchers spent a lot of time on the telephone getting a lot of ‘no thank yous’ to this half-baked idea, a charmless child of I’m a Celebrity and Mr and Mrs that told us virtually nothing about human relationships, or really anything of any significance whatsoever.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“It is very, very boring. The first task involves moving planks down a thing to get to another thing and raise a flag. The first couple to raise the flag wins. It takes for ever and the second task takes even longer and runs into the next episode, too. Matters improve slightly in the second episode, and maybe even after that – I don’t know, I’m not paid enough to sit through more than that.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“I thought no celebrity gameshow could possibly be worse than Freeze The Fear, where Holly Willoughby and Lee Mack stood watching TV personalities of microscopic fame take cold showers or jump into ice-cold lakes. Serves me right for being complacent. Unbreakable is even more boring, meaningless, ill-conceived and excruciating — and has even less well-known ‘celebs’. How could anyone imagine we want to see retired plumber Charlie Mullins, 69, and his girlfriend of eight months, 31-year-old Rara, recite the lyrics of a romantic ballad before bungee jumping off a crane?”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“We’re familiar with Richardson’s comedy persona — tight-fisted, neurotic, cynical — from the excellent mockumentary Meet the Richardsons, in which he and wife Lucy Beaumont play exaggerated versions of themselves. Like her daughter, Gill Adams makes the perfect foil for him and is, like so many great comedy personalities from Alan Partridge to Larry David, hilarious when she is simply reacting to things. This woman has funny bones.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“This is a well-worn genre, where a comedian goes travelling with a parent. The slight twist here is that Gill Adams is the mother of Jon’s wife, Lucy. Of course, they didn’t buy a property and, of course, Gill didn’t carry out her threat to move in with them. But as long as they kept up the pretence, we could enjoy their bickering.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“It was a pleasure, not least to Toby Jones himself, to find that his grandmother’s Second World War story contained just as many surprises as his grandfather’s. The jigsaw pieces came together from an amazing array of documentary sources. The only documents that didn’t surface were the hundreds of love letters Reggie wrote home to Dorki, which were interred in their joint grave. Even without them, this was an eye-popping story.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph