Radio Times

No. You can't see the photo of me playing chess with K9. Thanks for asking, phoning, emailing, stopping me in corridors, but it will not happen. You're thinking that I'm embarrassed, uncomfortable and maybe even ashamed, to which I can only say: what else would I be? But, look, if I showed anyone, I'd show you.

There's really just a small practical problem. The guy who took the photo used to think I was a bit of an eejit, so in my very first national newspaper article I tried my best to get him arrested and sent to prison. This is quite true. I see now that...

3 comments

Read more...

I'm aware that the TV schedulers no longer control our lives, thanks to VCR, DVR (digital video recorder) and PVR (personal video recorder), but it's still nice to sit down in front of a decent new film when it's actually on.

However, you must be an insomniac or shift worker to catch this week's first terrestrial showing of Kinsey, which Channel 4 is sneaking out at 1.30am – an inglorious fate for a film that features Liam Neeson and Laura Linney.

Other channels treat premieres equally shoddily – ITV1 considered ten past midnight the optimum start time for The Life of David Gale (starring Kevin Spacey)...

Read more...

As someone who spends much of his working day writing, I can vouch that it's not a cinematically appealing occupation. Thanks to computer technology, there's little that's visual about it. You can't even yank a sheet of A4 from the jaws of a typewriter, screw it up in writerly frustration and throw it in the general direction of the bin.

But the film industry still seems obsessed with the great literary figures from history. Admittedly, these biopics tend to steer clear of the act of writing itself, and concentrate on the trials of the author's private life. And they keep on coming out: the Brontë sisters will spring...

Read more...

I think there's always a point in the life of sitcoms when the creators are faced with a choice. It's the point where a show moves from just being a successful series into franchise territory. They can then go down two paths; either forsake most of the show's laughs in favour of giving the characters storylines offering more longevity like Friends. The second option is to try to ignore the onset of sitcom middle age and keep the status quo, risking staleness as a result.

Remarkably, the creators of Scrubs have straddled both paths and let the sitcom evolve while maintaining a high laugh count. Now...

5 comments

Read more...

Lucinda upped the sartorial ante this week, having apparently dressed herself from one of those bin bags you see torn open outside charity shops. She'd managed to grab a purple tartan beret, a hospital-green shawl and a zebra-striped skirt before the old lady arrived to open up.

The task was to bring themed cuisine to a traditional pub. When Michael suggested Italian, team leader Ian was excited. "It's a light bulb moment. Shoot it down or keep it up there." I must have missed that edition of Family Fortunes:

"Name something you do with a light bulb." "Shoot it down!" Eh-uh! "Sorry, the top answer was 'Keep it up there'....

Read more...

Let's get straight to the point - Jon Hamm is startlingly handsome. As Don Draper in BBC4's Mad Men (Sundays, 10:00pm, with a BBC2 repeat on Tuesdays at 11:20pm) he has the kind of sharply chiselled 1940s matinée idol looks that could stop traffic and possibly alter the sequence of traffic lights just by Hamm crossing the road.

He's one of the many gorgeous things about this brittle, amoral US import centred on advertising execs in 1960s Madison Avenue in New York (the 'mad' in Mad Men). Nothing much actually happens, but oh dear lord what does it matter, when nothing happens in such a sumptuous way.

1 comment

Read more...

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner used to write for The Sopranos, a show about male vanity, pride and rage. Mafiosi were the ideal metaphor, graphically showcasing men's destructive impulses. Mad Men has no guns, strippers or heaps of rigatoni, but its heart is just as black. It's set in a 1960s advertising agency - another macho hierarchy dedicated to doing something immoral, if not in this case actually illegal. Peeking into the brainstorming rooms of super-smart Madison Avenue is the hook, but the real point of Mad Men is to dissect the stunted male mind.

Those times when you stare out of your office window for ten minutes...

6 comments

Read more...

Poor old Kenneth Williams. The comic's final years - as detailed in his epically depressing diaries and, now, The Pain of Laughter: the Last Days of Kenneth Williams (Tuesday 8 April, 11:30am, BBC Radio 4) - were characterised both by virulent despair and tedious domesticity.

His days consisted of fish cakes and visits to Boots, of overpriced department store socks and disappointing day trips to buildings of putative historical interest, of calamitous encounters with members of the public and the methodical removal of nonexistent dust from his tiny, pristine London flat, of newspapers, enemas, aspirin and late-night phone calls to long-suffering friends during which he would...

Read more...

I suppose it makes sense that comedians can sometimes find themselves on the edge of madness. Spike Milligan was a famous case in point. Maybe it's the pressure they put themselves under to succeed that causes a breakdown.

In the case of Paul Merton, long-standing team captain on the BBC1 comedy Have I Got News for You, it was shortly before he became a household name. Back in 1990 he suffered a mental breakdown (reportedly caused by working too hard, overexcitement at reaching his personal goal, exacerbated by taking anti-malarial pills) and checked himself into Maudsley psychiatric hospital for six weeks.

If that's what it took to...

7 comments

Read more...

There's a photo of me somewhere playing chess with K9 in the 1970s. It's not my proudest Doctor Who moment, I'd have done better to pick Scrabble, but it is the earliest I can remember. Since then I've written about Who for BBC News and Radio Times, I've been to the Doctor Who offices in Cardiff, I've sat in on recording sessions and I dare not watch the new Five Doctors DVD because I might just be visible in one of the featurettes.

Break it to me gently if I am. I'll be the guy wearing a Tom Baker scarf - and you cannot know how...

7 comments

Read more...

Michael Kitchen has two facial expressions: one is a comedy impression of Prince Charles, the second looks like he's found an ulcer on his gum. He says his laconic catchphrase - "My name is Christopher Foyle and I'm a policeman" - in the strangulated fashion of someone with heartburn, and his minimalist movements suggest he fears knocking his trilby off on the doorframe of his Wolseley police car. He doesn't so much speak his lines as squeeze them out through gritted teeth.

Contrasting with the angst of Kitchen is the bumptious eagerness of Honeysuckle Weeks as driver Sam - a woman who could pick out a murderer while...

36 comments

Read more...

I was privileged to meet Richard Widmark in 2002 when he was at the National Film Theatre in London to discuss his work. He was smaller than you expected in real life – just 5ft 10in – yet a giant on the screen.

You can watch him on television this week as the sinister Dr Harris in medical thriller Coma, alongside Robert Taylor in western The Law and Jake Wade and as Chief Petty Officer Sam McHale in Second World War drama Destination Gobi. In all three he is equally commanding.

Though he never quite scaled the iconic heights of Henry Fonda, John Wayne or...

1 comment

Read more...

With Martin Scorsese's much-talked-about Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light opening in cinemas on 11 April 2008, the sometimes troubled marriage between rock and cinema seems in pretty good shape.

The band's frontman Mick Jagger has always been an iconic rock performer, and in the Swinging Sixties he redefined the relationship between an artist and his audience. So you can't really blame film directors for trying to bottle some of that Jagger juju.

"When I was a kid," says Jagger, "if you were a pop singer you made one bad movie – and that's what I thought I would do."

He thought wrong. Jagger made his feature...

Read more...

This week's task was to set up a laundry business from scratch - but someone had left a red sock in team Alpha's white wash... Raef manfully stepped up as project manager for team Renaissance, demonstrating from the beginning the focused and decisive style he'd bring to the role:

"I've got no problem, er, um, y'know with, with taking this, er, y'know straight by the, er..." He trailed off. There was silence as the rest of the boys gazed expectantly at their new leader. Time passed. Finally, "Horns!" they all shouted in exasperation. "Horns," Raef agreed, "Yeah, absolutely." Words are his tools, you know.

Meanwhile, flame-haired Jenny...

1 comment

Read more...

There's a moment involving the demise of an ailing cat in Sunday's Pulling (6 April, 9:30pm, BBC3) that is so outrageously funny - and just so, so wrong - that you will laugh till your hair falls out. But then, you will look guiltily behind you, just to make sure no-one is waiting to trap you in a butterfly net and entomb you in a coal cellar for being recklessly amused by something that will have cat-lovers everywhere reaching for the self-righteous moggy-shaped indignation they keep in a box above the fridge.

I'm the first to admit it's an appalling scene, but then Pulling's speciality is...

1 comment

Read more...