1. From The Irish Times, October 1999
As the title hints, this is a modern-day Quixotic tale, which pits the little man against the overweening forces of authority. Colin Firth plays the eponymous, mysterious hero who shows up as the new lodger on the doorstep of the Pannick family, led by alcoholic Lucy (Katy Murphy), and including her learning-disabled brother (David Brown, who is himself learning-disabled, giving a terrific performance). /.../ 

Donovan Quick is the kind of film which, in the wrong hands, could have ended up as the most awful sort of sentimental mush, but the screenplay /.../ and direction are too intelligent for that. Blair /.../ convincingly creates a cast of highly believable, sympathetic characters who you find yourself really rooting for. Read the full review here.

2.From TV Times 13 Dec.-00. 'It's very interesting .' Colin Firth remarks, 'how one gets interpreted as belonging to a particular period in English history. People seem to think I'm a very rich man with a mansion in Derbyshire who rides a horse and lived 200 years ago.' Instead, Colin lives in Islington and drives a C-reg Nissan Cherry. Even so, in his post-Darcy Pride and Prejudice days it's hard to imagine Colin a modern-day drama. 

One like Donovan Quick , for example. Colin is the Donovan of the title - a mysterious lodger in present-day Glasgow who transforms the life of a dysfunctional family. /.../ Donovan walks into this strange household and immediately things start to change for the better. But Donovan's certainly not all he seems. 

'To be honest, I didn't have a clue how to play him,' says Colin. 'Is he mad or is he sane? Is this a flight of sanity or a flight of lunacy? I don't know...' /.../ The star billing of Colin Firth should be enough to get the ladies tuning in, but we reckon this drama warrants a wider audience than just fans of Mr. Darcy. 

As always, Firth is compelling as the title character, a quiet mystery man who descends upon a Scottish town where the Head Quarter of a big transport business is located; one of those companies that outrages locals by cancelling services willy-nilly. Donovan takes a stand, makes with the ragtag Pannick family and, via flashbacks, it becomes clear what Donovan's motive is. This tale, about a search for atonement, unfolds nicely and is sweetly touching. 

3. From the BBC website, 28 December 2000:
Colin Firth smoulders back onto your screen in a very different role to his best-known, Mr. Darcy. This fine one-off tale of dysfunctional families is an update of Don Quixote, which skill fully deploys its source material to reveal a powerful social and political message for our times. Firth's Donovan is an entrepreneur like no other, arriving mysteriously and transforming the whole community through his regeneration of a local bus company. Surprisingly strong stuff, and grim in places, but very good.

4. From The Herald, Saturday, 9 December 2000 
/.../ As much as Donna Franceschild's writing worked wonders for Firth, a modern-day interpretation of Don Quixote, with sidekick Sancho Panza portrayed with a truly knockout performance by learning disabled actor David Brown, must have sounded like a supremely cockeyed piece of work when it first appeared in script form. Obviously an actor of stature and power was needed to bring all the unflinching nuances of the man to the screen in a believable way. 

Donovan is half-clod, half-poet, and the effect of his power and sensitivity is scalding. He is a fourteenth-century gallant lost in the revolution of 21st-century callousness. He arrives at a Scots boarding house and befriends the landlady's slow-witted brother who can no longer attend day school because the transport company, without consultation, have changed the routes.

Donovan commandeers an old coach and suddenly the pair are in business in a David v Goliath struggle against the big transport boys. Murphy, in the best performance of her career, gives a brilliant turn, shrieking her lines with desperate beak-like movements, a woman scorned by too many clouts on the chin by life. Firth says: 'It is so full of paradoxes. I think life is made of that. Is Donovan brave to take on the might of a big transport company or is he stupid? Is he gallant and noble or is he ridiculous and absurd? He is a walking contradiction.' In the script Firth has some memorable lines about standing up to the corporate bully boys: 'Resist them - stand up to them.' [Read the full article here]

From the London Times, 17 Dec. 2000 

One of the most underrated drama of recent years was Donna Franceschild's Taking Over The Asylum. For Donovan Quick she has updated Cervante's Don Quixote and set it in Glasgow, resulting in a cracking drama. 

Quick (Colin Firth appearing for the first time on television since The Turn of the Screw) is a wellspoken mysteryman, who takes a room with the dysfunctional Pannick family. When the local train service - Windmill Transport, naturally - fails to stop at the station where the Pannick son with learning disabilities (David Brown, who has the same problems) waits, Quick sets himself up against the great wheels of the establishment, and starts a rival one-bus company.

Since this must have been in production before the current transport crisis, those involved must be the only people for whom the current train-service horrors are fortuitous: the public will always relate to a romantic dream, but this will have thousands of commuters cheering and punching the air.

The real star, however, is Quick: spiritual, strange, otherwordly and madly sane, he appears blind to the Pannick's flaws, which include one alcoholic, one car thief and one grandmother (Liz Smith) who walks around naked.

6. From The Times, 29 December 2000, by Paul Hoggart 
If nothing else, Donovan Quick (BBC1) was memorable for Liz Smith´s most outrageous Christmas performance /.../ she spent the entire film wandering around in an ill-fitting slip, saying things like "Anyone seen ma false teeth?" It takes a special quality to make batty old wreckage so engaging, and she has it by the wrinkly stockingful. But then this was an idiosyncratic drama altogether.

True, there was nothing stunningly original about the big themes - a bunch of dead-beat losers take on the system and win (sort of ), led by an educated dreamer, who arrives among them like a deus ex machina and transforms their lives, while he himself is forced to confront his own inadequacies when things go horribly wrong. Well-trodden tracks perhaps, but the drama rolled along engagingly on a mixture of wry observation, absurdity and "You lookin' at me, pal?" realism.

The story was a loose updating of Don Quixote, with Colin Firth as the eponymous hero (though with a secret past). The similarity lay in the clash between Quick´s naïve idealism and the brutal, exploitative cynicism of the real world. Firth´s muted, Jane-Austen-adaptation courtesy was perfect.

Yet Don Quixote was unhinged by the fantasies of popular literature, and his enemies were everyday objects, transformed into monsters by his fevered imagination. Donovan Quick, by contrast, had been driven mad by guilt. His insanity was grounded not in delusion but in the effects of his own ruthlessness. 

His monsters also turned out to be real, a ruthless transport corporation called Windmill, a nightmare combination of aggressive deregulated bus company and privatised railway. The writer Donna Franceschild must be delighted with the timing of her blast of political rage, as travellers of all persuasions suffer the frustrations of our choking transport systems. But the real power of the piece lay in Franceschild´s exploration of the poor and alienated struggling to survive without support in hopelessly corroded communities.

Quick wanders into a cheap lodging house run by Lucy Pannick (Katy Murphy), an alcoholic with a delinquent son, a mentally disabled brother Sandy (David Brown) and a rapidly senescent grandmother (Liz Smith). /.../ It was an unusual, but often touching blend of reportage, fantasy and polemic. It is always a problem when art wishes to make philosophical points about life, how should it do so? And what, indeed, is the point of art? 

7. FIRTH AMONG EQUALS
From The Guardian, 29 December 2000, by Gareth McLean 
It's just as well Colin Firth read Cervantes' book and didn't simply rely on Nik Kershaw's interpretation of Don Quixote as the inspiration for the good deeds of Donovan Quick (BBC1). Otherwise, he'd be sporting fingerless gloves, a fluorescent snood and a spikey hairdo, and even the actor formerly known as Mr. Darcy couldn't carry off that ensemble. Happily, he wore tailored suits and fresh-from-the-box boxer shorts, and arrived like an Armani-clad spectre in the dingy Pannick household with good intentions.

Pannick by name, put-upon by nature, Katy Murphy was excellent as the fierce and fearful Lucy, nursing her wrath against the world and fuelling it with her own self-loathing. /.../ As Sandy, David Brown was incredibly watchable and Colin Firth was his usual impressive self. /.../ 

After years of telling Sandy to keep his head down and keep quiet, Lucy was jolted out of self-imposed servitude by Donovan's tilting at windmills - namely Windmill Transport, the multinational company which cancelled the train which took Sandy to his daycare centre. With his big bag of money - Donovan was evidently wealthy, possessing a platinum Amex and never having heard of macaroni cheese - he bought a bus, made Sandy a company director and bus conductor, and attacked his giant nemesis.

The renewal of hope which this new venture instilled in the Pannicks was delightful and Donna Franceschild's script trod a fine line between truthful emotion and magical realism, only occasionally stumbling into sentiment. And the appearance of comedy nuns only detracted slightly from the credibility of the whole.

Focusing on a transport company which drives its competitors out of business ("It's not enough to succeed. Others must be seen to fail", was the motto of the chairwoman, Kathleen Gorman, who may well have had a bigoted brother hanging around somewhere), Donovan Quick had an unashamedly socio-political message.

Yet it was rarely worthy or heavy-handed. Rather, it was a keen, funny and moving expose of monopoly capitalism. If Naomi Klein were to collaborate with John Byrne on a screenplay, this could well be the result. And although there wasn't a hint of Nik Kershaw, we could have done with a bit less Van Morrison, too.

8. Don Quixote rides again
From The Telegraph, 29 December 2000, by James Walton
Last night, after a couple of creditable near-misses and some spectacular failures, Christmas 2000 finally gave us a genuinely great piece of TV drama.

Donovan Quick (BBC1) could so easily have gone wrong: among the dangers it risked were sentimentality, excessive moralising and looking like a pastiche of those old Plays for today - many of which likewise featured a plucky group of ordinary folk taking on the evil capitalists. Early on, too, the programme appeared destined only for terminal dourness. After all, the main character Lucy (Katy Murphy) was a single mother whose preferred methods of coping with a car-stealing son, a senile grandmother, a mentally-handicapped brother and an alcoholic boyfriend were straightforward ones: shouting a lot and being an alcoholic herself. But then Donovan Quick (Colin Firth) showed up as her mysterious new lodger, and everything was transformed.

/.../ the scenes in which Quick and Pannick ran both their people's bus-route and rings round Windmill were irresistibly exhilarating. But the goodies' victories were short-lived. Lucy started out sounding depressingly fatalistic ("Big companies always get what they want") but ended up sounding merely right. Donovan's commitment to social justice meant that he got beaten up on a regular basis. We also discovered that he was, indeed, technically mad - a former Windmill high-flier who'd been sectioned by his family after he began acting oddly (ie decently) to opponents of the company. He was therefore carted off from Lucy's house to the asylum, so that the next time we saw him he'd been "cured" and was back wheeling and dealing without scruple. (As Quick had earlier said of Quixote, "He was a great madman. When they returned him to sanity, he was nothing.")

All of this, as I say, could obviously have been excruciating. Instead, the always-sharp script combined with the brilliant central performances to ensure the characters and the issues complemented each other so well that Donovan Quick managed to be both emotionally stirring and intellectually troubling - especially, of course, at a time when public unease about corporate power is at such a peak.

9. Takin' over the buses
From Scotland on Sunday, 24 December 2000, by Eddie Gibb
/.../ Colin Firth takes the titular role as a modern-day Quixote, a self-deluded dreamer who set out to right the world's injustices. He starts in Port Glasgow, where the local people are poorly served by the newly privatised bus company. With his Sancho Panza-style sidekick, a learning disabled man called Sandy who makes an enthusiastic clippie, Quick sets up a rival bus operator but quickly runs into stiff competition from a corporate bully determined to force them off the road. For the purposes of this show, the company is known as Windmill Transport but they really mean Stagecoach, right? /.../ [Franceschild]: "There are a number of bus companies that have acted in a pretty vicious way. If any company wants to say they're being libelled by this the only way they can be identified is by the practices of the company in the film. That would be like saying: 'We've run buses off the road so it must be us.' I don't think that's going to happen." Probably not, but from a Scottish perspective it is hard not to think of Stagecoach. For a start, how many major transport companies in Britain are run by a woman? Franceschild just laughs and says she sees the female bus magnate as a kind of Margaret Thatcher figure. The fact the government has been forced to blame the current rail crisis on "20 years of under-investment", shows how timely this drama is. Franceschild says that Windmill is based on a number of companies, and that the aggressive tactics it employs to stamp on the competition have all been employed by various bus operators round the country. /.../ 

At first she didn't see how a public transport strategy could possibly make an interesting television drama, until she hit on the idea of creating a contemporary Quixote. Quick is mad enough to take on an established company on behalf of the community, and is symbolic of the current suspicion of multi-nationals that fuelled the Seattle World Trade Organisation protests. It becomes apparent that though Quick is quite mad, his actions empower the local people. 

This is not, as you will have gathered, run-of-the-mill TV entertainment. /.../ Despite the presence of Colin Firth, there is little that is hip or slick about Donovan Quick. The female lead is played by Katy Murphy, Franceschild and Blair's favourite actress, whose plain-girl looks go against the trend in TV drama for decorative female characters. There is an inescapable worthiness about Donovan Quick, though this has been leavened with a dark strain of humour. /.../