Stephen Critchlow

Stephen Critchlow 1966-2021

We were heartbroken to learn that our dear colleague, Stephen Critchlow, has passed away at the age of 54.

Red Dwarf XI, episode 4 - Officer Rimmer review

The Red Dwarf crew has faced many horrors: emotion-sucking GELFs, rogue simulants, despair squids, evil versions of themselves, and have even witnessed Winnie-the-Pooh being shot by firing squad, but this time they face possibly the worst horror of all: Rimmer with power.

The first of three stand-alone comedies concerning persons in vehicles. In Simon Brett's Get Away, Samantha Bond plays a weary divorcee, on the school run with a moaning teenage son (Angus Imrie) who thinks life is boring. When an armed robber (Stephen Critchlow) gets into the car, life gets less boring, but not by much: the bandit's another weary divorcee, and these are the sort of radio characters who, in the heat of a domestic argument or even an armed car-jacking, somehow continue to speak as if they're reading brittle wit from an over-precise script. When the denouement arrives you'll have been parked up waiting for it for several minutes, but all this is perhaps part of the charm of a neat, cosy vignette that moves smoothly from A to B.

By some strange turn of fate the new Classic Serial is Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's satire on the press (its ownership, practices and function). The story is simple. We are in the 1930s. A mighty newspaper proprietor, Lord Copper, believes wars are good for countries because they unite people against a known enemy. He is persuaded by a beautiful society hostess to send one of her social pets, John Boot, to report the war in far-off Ishmaelia. By mistake, another Boot, William, who writes the Daily Beast's nature notebook, is dispatched. William knows nothing of abroad or reporting. We understand that, like Voltaire's Candide, he will somehow come out of this mess quite well and make us laugh a lot. Jeremy Front has done a deft, sly adaptation, bringing out the brilliance of the characters. Sally Avens has cast it very well (Rory Kinnear as William and Stephen Critchlow as Corker are perfect, David Warner as Lord Copper is pluperfect) and directs it with panache. A better antidote to hysteria cannot be imagined.