Reception
Bradley was named 20th "Best Actor" in the 2006 BBC Drama Awards for his role as Elliot. He was longlisted for the 2007 National Television Awards, but was not shortlisted. The storyline which saw Elliot's wife Gina commit assisted suicide was the subject of a Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail debate. Rachel Pickering, a GP and hospice doctor from Greenwich, opined that the storyine was to be "condemned". She criticized Gina's dying words: "I want to be allowed to die with dignity", suggesting that The Voluntary Euthanasia Society has "hijacked" the word "dignity" in changing its name to Dignity In Dying. Pickering wrote that, in her own experience, the majority of MND patients die peaceful natural deaths. She was opposed by two correspondents, Lena Pycroft of London and Ray Knight of Thaxted. Pycroft congratulated the BBC for " into sharp relief the appalling dilemma facing terminally ill patients", while Knight commended: "The most telling point in the Holby City episode was that, having made the decision, the patient was happier and more relaxed - a fact repeatedly confirmed in real life. Is it not time our legislation reflected that?" A Holby City spokeswoman defended the storyline, stating: "Throughout every stage of the process, the production team and scriptwriters have worked very closely with researchers, advisors, expert medical professionals and specialist support societies, all from the field of motor neurone disease. Every part of the story, emotional and medical, was checked and discussed. This is a powerful, heartwrenching story that will challenge our audience."
The Times's David Chater commented positively on the episode "Elliot's Wonderful Life", writing that: "Holby City fans will love this episode It is highly effective in what it sets out to do, although – like so much television at Christmas – you need to drink a pint of warm Baileys for the full effect." The episode was selected as recommended viewing by several TV critics, including Dydd Iau of the Liverpool Daily Post, and Roz Laws of the Sunday Mercury, who noted: "It sounds a bit strange, but there's snow, carols and an uplifting happy ending for a change." The Mirror's Maeve Quigley called it "a timeless story", though questioned the plausibility of a world in which Elliot's patients went untreated, as "the NHS isn't a one- man band after all". In contrast, Robert Hanks of The Independent reviewed the episode negatively, calling it "incompetent to the point of sacrilege". Hanks wrote: "What it did add to the mix, that James Stewart never achieved, was to give the viewer an authentic frisson of empathy: there was a point towards the end - during an encounter with Elliot's miraculously resurrected, motor-neurone-disease-afflicted yet remarkably soignee and articulate wife - when I began to see never having been born as preferable, sometimes, to prime-time TV."
Read more about this topic: Elliot Hope
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)