Today's Joanna Page is Bye Bye Harry, a British road movie released in 2006, of which she was the star, and that you will never have seen. Ever. Until now.

We've been jumping all over the place chronologically, here, so let's recap the inexorable career rise of Ms Joanna Page. After leaving RADA in 1999, she went straight to the National Theatre for a series of medieval mystery plays, The Mysteries. She continued to do well in the theatre, with roles in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, As You Like It, What the Butler Saw, Aladdin, Doomsday, Camera Obscura, and Billy Liar (with Ralph Little), among others.

The world of film beckoned, too, with bit parts in Miss Julie and This Year's Love, and larger parts in From Hell, Very Annie Mary, Love Actually, and Gideon's Daughter.

And on tele, there were important roles in David Copperfield, The Cazalets, The Lost World, Ready When You Are Mr McGill, Making Waves, Mine All Mine and To The Ends of the Earth. She even found time to fit in a few radio plays and a music video in all that, too.

So by 2005/6, a starring role in a movie looked inevitable. Indeed, in his review of The Mysteries for The Independent, right at the start of her career, Robert Butler prophetically wrote, "As Eve, Joanna Page looks as if (now she's eaten that apple) she will be the love-interest in a movie very soon."

And then it arrived: No Snow which soon became Bye Bye Harry. She's the female lead – arguably the lead. It's a British road movie, a 'dark' rom-com by experienced comedy writer Graham Alborough . It's got noted director Robert Young at its helm. It's got two of the country's biggest rock stars in supporting roles. And when it was released, it featured at the country's leading film festival. 

So why haven't you heard of it until now? And why had you probably not heard of Joanna Page until Gavin & Stacey?

Problem is, I've been linguistically tricky. See, although I said it was a British road movie – and indeed it is, according to the British Council – I pulled a fast one. The bulk of the financing came from Germany and Slovakia. When I said "the country", the country I actually meant was Germany, the rock stars I mentioned were Bela B Felsenheimer and Til Schweiger (very big in Germany), and the film festival I mentioned was the Berlin film festival. 

And it's never been released anywhere else. Not France, not Belgium, not the Netherlands. It's certainly never been shown in Britain. And although you could get a version dubbed into German on rental in Germany, you couldn't get the original English language version until two weeks ago – on import from Amazon.de. 

So without fear of contradiction, may I present for your delight the very first, most comprehensive, most definitive and probably very last English language review of Bye Bye Harry aka Liebling, wir graben Harry aus.

Continue reading "Today's Joanna Page: Bye Bye Harry"

Read other posts about: Gavin and Stacey, Jason Bourne

Doctor Who/Torchwood

• It's RTD OBE now
• Which evil genius might that be [spoiler via]
• Russell T to write one of the new Torchwood episodes
• John Barrowman to be a judge on Canada's How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
• Gareth David-Lloyd trying to crack Hollywood

Awards

• Winners of the Monte Carlo TV festival [free registration required]
• John Pilger's War on Democracy wins Best Documentary at One World Media awards [free registration required]

Theatre

• Kevin Spacey to teach theatre at Oxford

Film

• Eva Mendes to star opposite Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant
• The first seven minutes of Wanted
• Aaron Ashmore joins Val Kilmer in The Thaw

British TV

• Maggie Thatcher drama gets BBC4 third highest ever ratings [free registration required]
• Noel Edmonds to 'mend broken Britain' for Sky One
• BBC preparing to launch integrated next generation iPlayer [free registration required]
• Chris Morris goes to CERN
• New DVD label for stand-up comics launches, with Stewart Lee as first disk

US TV

• AMC adds more dramas, include adaptation of Carter Beats The Devil, to roster
• Janel Moloney and Patrick Breen to star in Captain Cook's Extraordinary Atlas
• Life on Mars makes the move to New York
• Jason Bateman makes first-look deal with Fox
• NBC picks up John Wells' LAPD pilot
• More BSG next season plus TV movie prequel

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Read other posts about: Chris Morris, Life on Mars, Torchwood

Doctor Who

• Penultimate episode title and synopsis revealed [spoilers + thanks to Stu_N]
• Christopher Eccleston joins Hilary Swank in Amelia

Film

• Amanda Peet to star in 2012
• Leonardo DiCaprio for Captain America?
• Punisher: War Zone trailer

Art

• U2 selling a Basquiat
• Picassos stolen in Brazil

Books

• Russell Brand signs $3m publishing deal

British TV

• Adrian Lester returning for fifth series of Hustle
• BBC1 to screen Peter Moffat's Criminal Justice over five nights
• Kelly Reilly to star in possible Lynda La Plante franchise for ITV1
• Rob Brydon launches his own indie [free registration required]
• Final episode of The Apprentice got more than 10 million viewers
• UKTV to launch new channel, rebrand old [free registration required]
• Justin Lee Collins to front Crystal Maze successor [free registration required]
• Into The Labyrinth coming to DVD

US TV

• Details of the The Office spin-off
• Jon Voight to be evil mastermind in 24
• Jean-Christophe Novelli getting a series on Bravo
• Jericho fans buy a TV ad
• Will McCormack and Eric Christian Olsen to recur on Brothers & Sisters

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Read other posts about: 24, Gavin and Stacey, Jericho, The Apprentice

First, a couple of public service announcements. You can listen to Joanna Page and Kris Marshall on Tuesday's Daily Mayo (34 minutes, 16MB) talking about Fat Pig, and it turns out that absolutely everything I said about their interpretations of the play was right. I'm a theatre genius. You should listen to it purely for that reason alone, but it's also possibly the only time you'll hear either actor being asked to work out the volume of a hemisphere of radius 10cm. That might float your boat, too.

Our Joanna is also going to be on The Paul O'Grady Show this Friday (5pm C4, 6pm C4+1), discussing Fat Pig again - yes, I belong to a gym that has The Paul O'Grady Show (and Robyn and The Ting Tings) playing 24/7 on its TV screens: why do you ask?

Now, on with Today's Joanna Page, which is To The Ends of The Earth. As you might have gathered by now, I do loves a nice bit of naval fiction, particularly if it's set in the 19th century.

Not all period naval fiction is the same, though. CS Forester's series of books featuring Horatio Hornblower, personified on TV screens most recently by another Welsh god, Ioan Gruffudd, is about ambition, moral values, doing the right thing and the little details of life in the Royal Navy.

The Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian, on which the movie Master and Commander was based, are about many things including the mechanics of sailing, politics and the state of science and medicine during the times of the Napoleonic Wars. But principally they're about the etiquette and social life on board ships and within the Navy. You're stuck on board a ship of war for anything up to a year with a bunch of men who were probably pressed into service, rather than having volunteered, and you have very little to do: how do you keep charge? How do you while away your time?

William Golding's “To The Ends of the Earth” is a trilogy of books that follows young aristo Edmund Talbot as he makes his way down to Australia to become a politician. As you might expect from the author of Lord of the Flies, it's almost the flipside of the Aubrey-Maturin series: Aubrey, Maturin and the crews of the various ships Aubrey commands in the series are all jolly good chaps and fine company, with only a couple of exceptions; “To The Ends of the Earth” asks the more unpleasant question: what if you're stuck on board a ship populated by complete bastards and you're not too well laden with social skills yourself? What do you do then?

Book 1, the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage, concerns the downfall of one of Talbot's fellow passengers, the Reverend Colley and is something of a mystery story - what happened to the Reverend that brought him so low? Close Quarters follows on and concerns an obviously ill Talbot and his instant love for Marion Chumley, a passenger on another ship they encounter. The third book, Fire Down Below, concludes the voyage of the increasingly unreliable HMS Pandora.

In 2005, “To The Ends of the Earth” was turned into a series of three TV movies for BBC2. Guess who they got to play Marion.

Continue reading "Today's Joanna Page: To The Ends of the Earth"

Read other posts about: Gavin and Stacey

As promised, it's competition time again. This time, it's your chance to win a copy of classic Channel 4 comedy drama Porterhouse Blue on DVD.

In late-'80s Britain, Porterhouse College, Cambridge, is an anachronism, its students uniformly male and (in the vast number of cases) privately educated. When the incumbent Master dies (from a stroke brought on by overeating – a Porterhouse Blue) the government gets its revenge on Porterhouse by appointing as his successor an old graduate, the politician Sir Godber Evans. One of the tiny minority of state-school students the college has had forced on it over the years, Evans returns to his alma mater determined to drag this bastion of privilege into the twentieth century. The elderly academic staff cease their bickering and close ranks against him, but the new Master finds his most implacable and unscrupulous opponent in Skullion, the college porter.

First broadcast in 1987, Porterhouse Blue was based on the book by Tom Sharpe, and starred David Jason, Ian Richardson, John Sessions, Griff Rhys Jones, and a host of top notch character actors. It's still very funny, although even at the time of broadcast, it was satirising a Cambridge University of decades past, rather than the University as it was then: there were no men-only colleges or curfews; you couldn't move for condoms and sex advice being handed out to freshers and research students; and porters mostly rolled their eyes at any 'young gentlemen' who weren't so good at actual work. It's fairer to say it satirised the university's latent tendencies and attitudes with a college of extremes.

Having said that, the real-life Peterhouse College was still a bit weird.

All the same, it's still very well written, funny and some of its points still hit home, whether you've ever been there or not. The students who think they can solve all the world's problems so easily – by banning sex – the academic vs sporty divide: it's all recognisable.

Jason opened everyone's eyes to his acting potential with his portrayal of Skullion, the most fervent of Porterhouse supporters, and Richardson's lefty Master makes an interesting contrast to his later, more famous Machiavellian roles. Sessions is a little bit lacking as the swot who hates all the 'young gentlemen' and has a crush on his bedder, but he still manages to carry the b-plot well. And there's a cracking theme song by the Flying Pickets.

At three hours run-time, it's a little bit of a marathon but one that's probably worth running. No extras to speak of on the DVD, but we're used to that by now from 4dvd.

To win a copy of Porterhouse Blue, as per usual, all you have to do is leave a witty and amusing comment below or plead your case, explaining why you're the most deserving recipient. The deadline for entries is the 18th June 2008. Good luck!

Porterhouse Blue is available for £19.99, but you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk for £9.48.

Disclaimer: I went to Cambridge University. In mitigation, I'll just say that I did go to one of the more rubbish colleges, rather than one of the posher central ones. It's interesting to see, incidentally – despite the fact all the Porterhouse scenes were filmed elsewhere – how much the town has changed, and how much it hasn't. No bike ban on Trinity Street in 1987 for starters...

Absolutely is something of a lost gem (note to self: will it be obvious to readers that this is the start of the blog's “Lost Gems” series? Must consider better way of introducing it). First broadcast on Channel 4 between 1989 and 1993, it was repeated approximately… never.

Yet it is fondly remembered by literally lots of people. Even me, who went to see one of the third series episodes being recorded, which was triffic.

An exciting union of Scottish comedians (Gordon Robin Hood Kennedy, Jack The Jack Docherty Show Docherty, Moray 'Not a Lot' Hunter, Pete 'Just as little' Baikie), a Welsh comedian (John Naked Video Sparkes) and an English comedienne (Morwenna The Morwenna Banks Show Banks), it was, in many ways, the natural successor to Monty Python.

Both absurd and dark, it wasn't afraid to mock, gross out or write overly long musical sketches and remains an influence for comedians ranging from Paul Whitehouse to Hardeep Singh Kohli – as you'll find out from this DVD box set that collects together every single episode as well as the cast.

Continue reading "Review: Absolutely Everything"