John Lloyd of the
Financial Times found that the most emotionally powerful segment of the show was the scene where her father told her "God is in charge, not you" when she agonised over her shortcomings in Crimea. He called it "moving and powerful". Lloyd thought that the show's remainder was "uneven but in a good way". In a negative review,
The Daily Telegraphs Stephen Pile wrote that the programme "was flagged up as a big revisionist drama showing the real Flo, but there was little in this entire 60 minutes that was not described with infinitely more wit, style and detail by
Lytton Strachey in
Eminent Victorians as long ago as 1918". Aidan Smith of
The Scotsman said
Laura Fraser, who played Nightingale, "deliver[ed] her lines with gusto".
The Timess journalist Stuart Wavell called the programme "remarkable not only for its poignancy but also for the new light it sheds on a national icon". In a negative review,
The Independent columnist
Tom Sutcliffe wrote that it "a bit more lively than the usual church pamphlet" and "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". David Belcher of
The Herald penned a positive review, stating, "Writer-director Norman Stone certainly had his work cut out in crafting an arresting modern-day depiction of the nursing heroine of the Crimean war. That he largely succeeded was owing to his diligence in trawling Nightingale's own writings." ==References==