Review: Colombia with Simon Reeve
A few years ago I wrote two reviews on here of programmes featuring Stacey Dooley, a BBC presenter who features on ‘youth-oriented’ documentary programmes, and I was pretty scathing about her manner and about...
Category: Reviews
Labour election broadcast a disaster
BBC iPlayer – Party Election Broadcasts: Labour – English Local Elections: 21/04/2017 I just saw the Labour Party Election broadcast, which is intended as being for the local elections next month (4th May), although...
Brexit: Back to the 16th Century?
Last Tuesday, there was a programme on BBC Radio 4 in which Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist who was a strong Remain supporter, compared the present Brexit situation with the Elizabethan era, in which...
The Investigation that revealed nothing
Last Thursday night, the last in a four-part series called [*The Investigator*](http://www.itv.com/hub/the-investigator-a-british-crime-story/2a4104a0001) showed on ITV. The series attempted, or purported, to investigate the death of Carole Packman, who disappeared in 1986 after attempting to...
Undercover: Some impressions
I couldn’t write a full review of *Undercover*, the six-part TV series about a police spy (Nick, played by Adrian Lester, right) who fell in love with and married the woman he was meant...
Review: Happy Valley, The A Word
Last Tuesday, The A Word started at 9pm on Tuesday, the slot that had been occupied by the second series of *Happy Valley*, the Yorkshire-based six-part police drama starring Sarah Lancashire as a police...
Review: Britain’s ISIS Supporters
[ISIS: The British Women Supporters Unveiled](http://www.channel4.com/programmes/isis-the-british-women-supporters-unveiled) from Channel 4 (available for 26 days as of this writing) On Monday night Channel 4 broadcast what purported to be an investigation into a group of British...
Review: The World’s Worst Place to be Disabled
The World’s Worst Place… is a documentary featuring Sophie Morgan, a British model and TV presenter who has been a wheelchair user since being paralysed in a car accident twelve years ago, travelling to...
Review of Wanted: A Very Personal Assistant
Wanted: A Very Personal Assistant is another part of BBC Three’s ongoing season of programmes about disability, Defying the Label. In this two-part series, four young people with mobility impairments of differing severity were...
Review: Don’t Take My Baby
Don’t Take My Baby is an hour-long BBC drama, broadcast on BBC Three (which is likely to be removed from digital TV and only shown online as of next year, something one review says...
Review: Kids in Crisis
Kids in Crisis was a programme about children with severe mental health problems in the UK who are being transferred a long way from home, sometimes hundreds of miles, because there is no inpatient...
Hard come, easy go
Over the past month the BBC has been running a four-part series called Protecting Our Foster Kids, which went out late at night and featured a series of children in Dorset (a mostly rural...
The lawyer who doesn’t know a man from a dog
*I don’t know what sort of dignity these people have, because a lot of them are just thugs who got where they are by killing people and kicking people’s heads in. It’s more apt...
Review: 100 Days of UKIP
UKIP: The First 100 Days (Channel 4; viewable for next 29 days in UK only) Last night, Channel 4 screened a programme which imagined what the first 100 days of a UKIP government would...
Review: The Theory of Everything
*The Theory of Everything* is a bio-pic of Professor Stephen Hawking, the British professor of theoretical physics and former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge university, who is best-known for his book *A Brief...
Thalidomide: David Mason is no hero
Last Thursday there was a BBC documentary about thalidomide, the drug used to suppress sickness in pregnant women which was responsible for serious birth defects in the children of the women who took it....
What’s so great about TomTom?
Last week I bought a new sat-nav, a TomTom Pro 5150 Truck Live, which is a specialist one for truck drivers which has information about vehicle size limits and truck speed limits (normal sat-navs...
Ukraine and Drugs: the vapidity of Stacey Dooley
[Europe’s Dirty Drug Secret: Stacey Dooley Investigates](http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03961vn/Europes_Dirty_Drugs_Secret_Stacey_Dooley_Investigates/) (viewable in the UK until next Sunday) Last Monday I saw a programme featuring Stacey Dooley, the British “investigative journalist” whose efforts at understanding the divisions in...
Young people’s mental health: failed by the system
BBC Three: Failed by the NHS Last night there was a documentary on BBC Three about young people whose mental health conditions went untreated for months or years by the NHS mental health services,...
Review: Don’t Call Me Crazy
Recently a series called Don’t Call Me Crazy, set inside an adolescent mental health unit in Manchester, the now-closed McGuinness Unit, was screened on BBC Three, apparently the first time cameras had been allowed...