How to stand out in the battle of the Christmas TV reviews

Spoilers allowed: most readers are coming to our reviews for a fresh take, not a recommendation

From Watership Down and The ABC Murders to Call the Midwife and Les Misérables, it’s been a busy time for a TV critic. But then it’s the same every year: stuffed full of turkey, most likely drunk, we all like to gather round the telly and vegetate in front of a cavalcade of supposed Christmas crackers.

As the Indy’s head of culture, I pinpointed the programmes we’d need to review back at the start of December, when the schedules were announced. From there, I contacted the relevant PRs, made sure we had access to everything on preview and went about commissioning our excellent TV critics.

In terms of reviewing, the guiding rule now is that you can no longer assume any kind of loyalty.

You have to earn readers’ attention afresh every time, with headlines and punchy intros, but beyond that you are trying to build a reputation for quality to keep people coming back. There is a fine line between provocative and alienating. You have to be different but you also have to be good.

Unlike with hotels or restaurants, most readers are not coming to TV reviews for recommendations, but because they have watched the programme in question and want an opinion on it (this is also why TV reviews, unlike film ones, can include spoilers). What will they not have thought of? What is a way of looking at this programme that might expand their view of it?

The three ways in are:

1. Insight – analysing a programme in an unusual way

2. Humour – making the reader laugh

3. Knowledge – delivering context or facts that they might not know about

Ideally you combine some of these. Consider this intro in the review of the BBC’s new drama Les Misérables by ​our chief TV critic Ed Cumming.

“Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It’s the music of a people
Forced to watch Les Mis again

“Sorry. That’s unfair. There are no songs in BBC1’s new six-part adaptation of Les Misérables. Or at least no musical songs, no tigers coming at night or impassioned choruses from the barricades. This is the pure stuff, cooked up straight from Victor Hugo’s novel by our master chef, Andrew Davies.”

For me, that’s the perfect blend of original thinking, humour and authority.

“The Telegraph cartoonist Matt has a rule not to go with the first joke he thinks of, or the second, but the third, which I think is not a bad rule of thumb,” says Cumming.

As a counter to all this, I’d sound a note of warning that you can’t assume the readers have seen the same things as you, not just TV but films, games, memes, news etc. In one sense, this is about the range of options.

Streaming services behave like tech companies, and the fact we watch on iPads, phones etc, TV can feel quite futuristic, but there is a generational divide between Netflix-loving millennials and the older people who watch mainly Freeview channels.

“Personally I find it helpful to slow down and imagine our readers are not constantly on Twitter,” says Cumming.

“If you look at the stats, the biggest number of viewers, and therefore page views, are for primetime BBC and ITV programmes.” (And it is true that our Mrs Brown’s Boys review has reached 10 times as many people as our piece on Black Mirror.)

“Just because Twitter is talking about something doesn’t mean many people are watching it, just as a programme’s absence from ‘woke’ debate doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a huge viewership.”

Yours,

Patrick Smith

Head of culture