Posted on August 18, 2008 | |
Film
Theatre
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Posted on August 1, 2008 | |
Casting's a funny old game, isn't it? You can ruin a production with it, or make it a triumph. You can make thousands flock to it, or send them running for the hills.
Take The Death Collectors for instance. It's been sitting on my metaphorical shelf for the best path of a month now, glowering at me sinisterly. I say sinisterly purely because it's a Sylvester McCoy story and I find them about as appealing as an emergency tracheotomy performed with a Pizza Hut knife and coke straw. This one doesn't even have Hex (or, shudder, Ace) to make it slightly more appealing.
Oh, but what's this? Katherine Parkinson is the guest star? The sort of red-headed one with the nice voice off The IT Crowd?
Ah. Now, I really think you should have made more of that Big Finish. Maybe written it in giant letters across the cover and relegated Sylvester McCoy to the small print perhaps?
Pass me my iPod…
Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who - The Death Collectors"
Posted on July 30, 2008 | |
Where: Duke of York's Theatre, St Martin's Lane, London
When: 7.45pm Mondays-Saturdays, 3pm matinees on Thursdays and Saturdays. Runs for 10 weeks from the 15th July 2008
How long: One and half hours without interval
How much: £15-£47.50 (includes £1 restoration levy)
Tickets from: 0870 060 6623 (+£3), Ticketmaster (+£3) or www.theambassadors.com (-£1.50/ticket on top three price bands)
Yes, I'm back. It's me, “Easily swayed into going to the theatre by famous TV casts” man. How you doing?
This time, I went to see Catherine Tate (Doctor Who, The Catherine Tate Show), Chris O'Dowd (The IT Crowd) and Francesca Annis (Between The Lines, Dune and Krull - she's been in better stuff, too, but the last two amused me) in some sort of play or something about teachers behaving badly.
Continue reading "Review: Under the Blue Sky"
Posted on July 18, 2008 | |
Doctor Who
Film
Theatre
- Full cast of Old Vic's The Norman Conquests revealed
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Posted on March 2, 2008 | |
Sounds a bit sh*t, but you never can tell with SRO's marketing evil. Plus it has a good pedigree ('from the makers of The IT Crowd,' they say. Who's that? The writers? The cameramen? The people who press the DVDs?)
ARCADIA
Arcadia is a youthful sitcom set in the real world around Clacton's finest computer games shop Games 4 U with a cast of characters whose minds are somewhere else entirely…
The shop is in financial trouble and ever-so-slightly neurotic manager Tony (Edinburgh Fringe Award winner Nick Mohammed) is doing his best to keep things afloat, ably assisted by Mr Sci-Fi convention himself, Jeremy Stokes (Matt Green), and the attractive, though unobtainable, Bella.
Tony believes he can design games better than the ones he sells; the problem is all his ideas are rubbish. Jeremy has played and completed every computer game ever released while still managing to have a surprising amount of luck with the ladies. This is all the more remarkable considering Jeremy regularly arrives for work dressed as gaming characters no one else has heard of. Bella is the gorgeous level-headed young assistant and the apple of Tony's eye but unfortunately she is more interested in the mysterious hacker Clint who masquerades as an asexual-cyber-terrorist but is in fact a nice middle-class boy who still lives at home with his mum.
If you would like to join us for a night of comedy for ONE NIGHT ONLY on Saturday 8th March at 7.00pm then apply now! The minimum age for audience members is 16 years.
You can apply online at www.sroaudiences.com. Filming's at the BBC TV studios in White City.
Posted on October 5, 2007 | |
In the UK: Thursdays, 9.30pm, BBC2
In the US: Not yet acquired
Peter Serafinowicz has been quietly lurking, almost invisibly, within many of the good British comedy shows and movies of the last decade. He's been in Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Look Around You, Little Britain, I'm Alan Partridge, Black Books and more. He's also king of the voiceover: you may remember him from such shows as South Park, The IT Crowd and Hippies, as well as, most famously, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, in which he played the voice – but not the body – of Darth Maul.
Despite this, he doesn't get the name-check recognition of the likes of Simon Pegg, Matt Lucas et al. Is this about to change, now he's got his own show, thanks to the all-powerful YouTube?
Er, maybe. Or, at the very least, more people will try to pronounce his name…
Continue reading "Review: The Peter Serafinowicz Show 1.1"
Posted on September 14, 2007 | |
Doctor Who
- David Tennant advises Scottish acting students to give Taggart a call
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Posted on September 13, 2007 | |
Doctor Who
- Which BBC Wales employee just got a £10,000 bonus?
- The Sarah Jane Adventures starts on the 24th and there's a preview at Off The Telly [minor spoilers]
Film
Commercials
- Paddington's back and he's giving Marmite a try
Music
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Posted on September 4, 2007 | |
Doctor Who
Film
Art
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Posted on August 26, 2007 | |
In the UK: Fridays, C4, 9.30pm. Repeated on C4+1 an hour later. Obviously.
In the US: Being remade by NBC as we speak.
Characters re-cast: 0
Major characters gotten rid of: 1 (next episode)
Major new characters: 1 (next episode)
Format change percentage: 0%
When you think about it, a big chunk of classic – and not so classic – British sitcoms are set in an office of sorts. For example, On the Buses, Are You Being Served, even Dad's Army are all work-based sitcoms. However, The Office, for obvious reasons and not just its name, has occluded these in most people's minds and prevented any subsequent office-based sitcoms from emerging (the reverse is true in the US). Indeed, The Office has started a whole number of trends, including a veering towards cringe-comedy rather than joke-based comedy.
However, it's fitting that The IT Crowd has been trying its best to buck that trend, since it has The Office's producer Ash Atalla at the helm. The IT Crowd is sort of the flipside of The Office. It's traditionally filmed, with traditional characters, traditional jokes and traditional plots.
It's also funny. At least, I think so.
Continue reading "Review: The IT Crowd 2.1"
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