I was on my way back from a (rare) weekend away from the TV/computer so I didn’t watch any TV last night. Neither did our team of writers it seemed, so I was wondering what the craic was with Florence Nightingale. Reading the overnights this afternoon, I saw that it pulled in a very healthy 4.7million viewers. So viewers seemed interested in it, so what did the reviewers think, I wondered…

The sometimes entertaining Sam Wollaston on The Guardian seemed to sort of like it, but you never can tell with him. Sam told us that the drama concentrated on post-Crimean period of her life when she campaigned for all sorts. “What she was, though – as this film and Laura Fraser’s performance in the title role do a good job of showing – was a tireless and driven campaigner.”

Over in The Independent, Thomas Sutcliffe revealed his suspicions after seeing that the production company Faith & Values was behind it. Once he got over this fact, he felt the drama was a little unsatisfactory, “it fell down in not drawing a sharp-enough distinction between the music-hall simplifications of its song-and-dance numbers and the notionally more realistic scenes of the drama.”

And that’s all I could find. Which is odd because I was expecting blow-by-blow accounts of this all over the place. The small consensus online seemed to suggest that it was good enough (and the fact that the Nightingale-as-brilliant-nurse myth was blown out of the water), but won’t take its place in the Pantheon of period dramas.