What is it about Big Finish and piers? Every time they want to do somewhere creepy, they send the cast off to a pier to get tormented by comedians and Punch and Judy. Piers are the sandpits of the modern audio horror age, apparently.

This time, though, it's Sapphire and Steel who have been assigned to the sea-front, rather than the usual Doctor Who crowd. In the company of Sam Kelly from 'Allo, 'Allo and plenty of other Big Finish plays (The Holy Terror, Return to the Web Planet), Joannah Tincey and David Horovitch, our heroes, David Warner and Susannah Harker, manage to wend their way through an above-average S&S tale that for once, contains an interesting idea or two.

Continue reading "Review: Sapphire and Steel - Remember Me"

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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

In the UK: Channel 4, 9pm, Wednesdays

Fact: "One in three families use some form of domestic help". This sounds like one of those statistics like "93% of people in Middlesbrough wear Etruscan snoods" that is obviously made up but because it involves some numbers, people blank it out and go "Really? Well fancy that."

One in three families? Across the whole country? Are we including paper boys in this or something?

Anyway, whatever the number, some people have to hire domestic help. How do you go about doing this? In the real world, the obvious answer is to use some form of domestic agency, like you might find in Yellow Pages, that carefully vets all its employees, ensures they have decent qualifications, no criminal record problems, experience and a personality that doesn't make you want to hire Freddie Krueger instead.

But this isn't the real world (or even The Real World): this is Channel 4. More importantly, this is Channel 4 post-Wife Swap. What we want is conflict and if that involves introducing some employers who have the management style of Hitler to some potential employees with the skills of Frank Spencer and the attitude to life of a Big Brother contestant, so be it.

Continue reading "Review: Personal Services Required 1x1"

The Zygons are one of those Doctor Who monsters that are a firm fan favourite yet only ever appeared on-screen once.

Stars of the Tom Baker story The Terror of the Zygons, they scared, mainly thanks to the superb direction of blog god Douglas Camfield but also because of their shape-changing abilities, biological technology and weird lifestyle – they need to feed off the milk of the Loch Ness monster to survive.

They also amused, mainly because it was really hard to do convincing blue-screen work back in 1975. Still, who knows? Maybe the Loch Ness monster really does look like it's made of rubber and has a very stiff jaw.

Since then, they've popped up in all manner of unofficial and official tie-ins: Tenth Doctor novels, comic strips, New Adventures and videos.

So it seems appropriate that Big Finish have brought them back for an Eighth Doctor and Lucie adventure that is both silly and creepy.

Continue reading "Review: The Zygon Who Fell to Earth"

Read other posts about: Big Finish

Way back at the end of the 70s and the early 80s, there were two interesting trends. One was the arrival of the micro-computer. And with the arrival of the micro-computer came games. Screw work, hey?

Most important of all the new computer games, given the graphics of the time, were adventure games. These were commonly text-based: you got a load of text chucked at you – "You are in a small room. In the room is a chest of drawers" – to which you typed in a load of two word commands – "OPEN CHEST" – in order to solve all sorts of puzzles that had been set for you.

At the same time, role-playing games were taking off. In these, you had someone read out the words – "You are in a small room. In the room is a chest of drawers" – to which you responded as some kind of made up medieval character/spaceman/whatever "Doest the chest containeth anything usefuleth?" 

Some people got a bit tired by that and decided they'd do it for real – imagine Michael Douglas in The Game or Steven Dillane in The One Game, except with someone rolling dice as you wandered round a deserted lunatic asylum dressed as a wood elf.

And then someone had a cracking idea. "Why," asked TV producer Patrick Dowling, "don't we do something like that on tele for kids?" And thus, The Crystal Maze was born.

Hang on. That's not right. 

No, wind back a decade or so and switch channel. Because back on the BBC, someone had the idea of something more cerebral and a touch more sci-fi, in which celebrities and brainy members of the public would travel to a far off planet (the BBC studios), interact with shape-changing dragons, and try to solve puzzles that would allow them to go home.

It was The Adventure Game, it lasted for four series. It's never been repeated or released on DVD. It's a Lost Gem. Which is ironic because the pesky dragons kept nicking the gems every week.

Here are the titles to get you in the mood.

Continue reading "Lost Gems: The Adventure Game"

So what are we reckoning: biggest double-bluff in Who history or the most elaborate, best kept secret in television history?

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who 4x12 - The Stolen Earth"