Press clippings Page 4
The Nan Movie review
Brutally unfunny outing for Catherine Tate's sweary old lady.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 18th March 2022The Nan Movie review
Catherine Tate's 'comedy' is as interminable as it is revolting.
Robbie Collin, The Telegraph, 18th March 2022The Nan Movie review
The Nan Movie is a terrible film with a much better film hiding inside it. And Catherine Tate should have made that film instead.
Rich Johnston, Bleeding Cool, 18th March 2022The Nan Movie review
Weirdly, thanks to the skills of Tate and Parkinson, The Nan Movie does a better job with its dramatic beats than it does with its comedy.
Ian Freer, Empire, 18th March 2022Here We Go sitcom series coming to BBC One
Alison Steadman, Katherine Parkinson, Jim Howick and Tom Basden will star in Here We Go, a family-based sitcom series that follows on from 2020 pilot Pandemonium.
British Comedy Guide, 15th February 2022Tom Basden's sitcom Pandemonium ordered by BBC
Plebs creator Tom Basden has landed a BBC One sitcom. Production is underway on six 30-minute episodes of Pandemonium, following on from a successful pilot that aired at Christmas.
British Comedy Guide, 20th September 2021Soundtrack of my life: Katherine Parkinson
The comic actor picks songs important to her.
Alex Flood, NME, 14th May 2021Comedy podcasts round-up 5
Politics, relationships and spoofery.
Veronica Lee, The Arts Desk, 29th April 2021Sitting was Katherine Parkinson's debut play, adapted for TV by BBC Lights Up, a remarkable collusion between telly and theatres throughout a land-in-the-days-of-Covid: there will be 18 in all, featuring such writers as Colm Tóibín and Frances Poet, and mesmerising themes for our times. And it just goes to show that an enterprise can be worthy, valuable - and yet gleefully witty and poignant.
There were surely influences of Alan Bennett behind the overlapping monologues of three "sitters" for a portrait, but the tone overall was singularly Parkinson's. The story was simply told: the sitters, faced with silence, slowly begin to gab away to the unseen artist, and are thus revealed, early, simplistically, as Luke (Mark Weinman), a wife-hating sad man with daddy issues; Cassandra (Alex Jarrett), a wannabe actor and pathological fantasist; and Mary (Parkinson), a fading mistress with distressing sibling memories.
The overlapping of direction, with some voices cutting in and cutting off, some on triptych split-screen, the intercuts of monologue ("She's really getting through the Rennies at the moment"/"I absolutely love sex"), all against the same drab studio curtain, leads you to thoroughly believe it's all contemporaneous and unrelated. Which just leads to slow, eye-widening shock as the final 10 minutes reel by. A triumph, not only for the writer: Weinman and Jarrett also convince with consummate skill. Presumably, with BBC Four about to end commissioning of new content - without it we wouldn't have, say, Charlie Brooker, or Detectorists - this has just scraped in under the wire, and I can't tell you how glad I am, nor just how much the corporation is skittering away its own pearls.
Euan Ferguson, The Observer, 11th April 2021Sitting, BBC Four, review
Katherine Parkinson's play veers from humorous to quietly shattering.
Fiona Mountford, i Newspaper, 7th April 2021