Tea with Judi Dench: ‘touching’ show is must-watch Christmas TV

“Tea with Judi Dench” is “the most touching TV you’ll watch all Christmas”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian.

On the surface, it doesn’t sound that exciting. This is a show where “someone comes to visit Dench for a cup of tea and that’s literally it” – which could be “dispiriting” were it not so “relentlessly charming”.

Kenneth Branagh goes to see Dench at her home in Surrey, and the pair – who have been friends for almost 40 years – have a “lovely, easy, breezy relationship”. Over the next 45 minutes, the actors “natter away pleasantly with no real direction”.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“At one point, they potter over to Dench’s parrot, Sweetheart, in the hope that it will call Branagh a ‘slag’.” But mostly they “reminisce” about their stage careers and the people they’ve lost, and “quote Shakespeare to each other, at length”.

Blending “personal anecdotes” with “rarely seen archive material”, it’s an “unflinching” documentary that opens the doors to the Oscar-winning actor’s “stunning” country home, said Emma Guinness in the Daily Mail.

Dench gets “tearful” as she reflects on the loss of her late husband Michael Williams, who died of lung cancer in 2001. Elsewhere, we’re “treated to more lively conversation, humorous insights and moments of genuine candour and emotion”.

The parts that “interested me the most are when she talks of memory”, said A.N. Wilson in The Times. Like many nonagenarians, she explains how she often can’t remember what happened the day before – but the “consoling thing” is that her head is still filled with Shakespeare.

Dench is an “extraordinarily intent listener” and a “nimble” interviewer, said Heritage in The Guardian. She manages to tease out details from Branagh that might otherwise have been left unsaid. It’s a style that risks encouraging “indulgent waffle”, but for “Tea with Judi Dench”, an edited show about two very old, close friends, it’s “perfectly pitched”.