TV Reviews

Victor Lewis-Smith, satirist, critic, and notorious puncturer of overinflated egos, shares a selection of his finest reviews from his years as the Evening Standard’s resident TV critic, with new and updated material. Lewis-Smith’s hilarious and scathing musings on the ‘idiot’s lantern’ are a chronicle of two decades of British television, and a celebration of the art of criticism.
As well as reproducing some of his most coruscating reviews (both positive and negative), the book chronicles the fallout that their publication provoked from those celebrities for whom anything less than 900 words of closely-argued adulation simply will not do. Celebrity chefs, compelling documentaries, dodgy science programmes, one-hit wonders, glorious arts shows, and comedies wondrous and dire, they’re all here, as are the responses, from sycophantic grovelling to death threats, and everything in between. None of our televisual gods is beyond the reach of Lewis-Smith’s rapier pen. Through his reviews and the searing commentary that accompanies them, Lewis-Smith offers an incisive appraisal of television and its relationship with British culture in the 21st Century.

‘The sharpness of his one-liners delights, and there are so many of them… From a Lewis-Smith review I get, on average, two giggles, one guffaw and a scream of laughter.’ The Spectator