Daleks Invasion Earth

The big screen Dr Who And The Daleks (1965) was a medium budget movie and a favourite at the box office. The followup was Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD, now restored and released on Blu-ray. It enjoyed a bigger budget but less success. Bernard Cribbins is a beat bobby daydreaming of Spanish hols, when […]

Doctor Who and The Daleks

If Paul McGann counts then so does Peter Cushing. As Doctor number two he provides another Wholock link and now we can see him restored, in crisp, shimmering blu-ray technicolor. 1963 and Dr. Who Mark 1, William Hartnell, was being lapped up on TV. Opportunity was seized and a glamorous new cast assembled. Peter […]

Don’t Be a Schlemiel, Watch a Crisp New Version of It Always Rains On A Sunday

Tommy Swann has vaulted the walls of Dartmoor and is hiding out in exlover Rose’s Anderson shelter. (In a flashback we see Rose, then a blonde, having more fun) Rose is now married to kind, steady, ordinary George. From Rose and her family we reach out toexplore a day in busy Bethnal Green. Through dance […]

It’s Curtains for Poirot

Curtain, along with Roger Ackroyd is Christie at her most fiendish. She tightly corrals her characters, coming full circle and using Styles once more, cramming the guesthouse with likely vics and perps. But as she reveals a killer beyond the law, Poirot is presented with a series of troubling moral dilemmas. The ultimate revelation […]

If the Trailer is a Freshly Squeezed Jaffa…

…the film is squash diluted to homeopathic traces. I watched the trailer again and understand why I was excited to see the film. The golden grey tones, the primo cast, the building drama of the score. The movie, though, conveyed this excitement minimally. I knew intellectually that Smiley was circling the big four but I […]

Three-Hundreths of a Second Behind the Flying Housewife

Newsnight featured author Janie Hampton whose subjects include the London Olympics of 1948, when the games came in under budget and made a modest profit. Dorothy Parlett, a sprinter, won a silver, she trained four times a week, fitting it in around a full-time job as a short-hand typist for the Suez Canal Company (from whom she had […]

Why they didn’t call it “One Man’s Struggle To Embrace His DESTINY!”

Just watched “The Kings Speech” (label me “early adopter“) Marvelled that the climax of the film, the bit that has your white knuckled hands sweatily gripping the arms of your club chair, is a man in a darkened room speaking into a microphone for nine minutes. Much mainstream storytelling has situations dramatic but remote, causing us […]

Fire Breathing Life Lessons

Took tots to the circus, the yin to television’s yang. No “If you need me, I’ll be in the winnebago drinking champagne with my reflexologist” for these guys. Albert (winner of “Russia’s got Talent”) has an impressive balancing act but is also the interval photographer. Antonio Candela eats fire and works the box office. Everybody helps out […]

Temple, Get Those Spectacles To Cairo!

Francis Durbridge is the creator of Paul Temple and the master of radio drama, a most transporting and transformative entertainment. We witness Paul and Steve tottering into wobbly dinghies, standing safely back from blazing vehicles and discovering ransacked rooms or bludgeoned corpses, with only our ears to give us eyes. The supporting characters are vivid, […]

Why I Have Not Not Been In Touch

I have not died tragically in a charity attempt on Mt. Everest. (It’s been pointed out that everyone and his great aunts have been clawing up those majestic slopes. Once Blessed Brian’s stomped about on your face you can kiss goodbye to any mountain mystique you had) No, I simply lost interweb connection for a […]