BLOGS
Are all the Welsh great actors?
- Posted at 1:20pm
- 27 March 2009
- by AndrewCollins-RT
In the early 1980s, the Welsh Development Agency made an ad that was all over the telly: as a helicopter-mounted camera panned majestically across hills and valleys and a doctored version of Bread of Heaven was sung by a male voice choir, a long list of businesses ran across the bottom of the screen, all of which were "made in Wales".
Although the country had its industrial guts ripped out in that cruel decade, national pride thrives. In fact, Wales has become a cultural hub, with Gavin &
Stacey partly based in Barry, Doctor Who and Torchwood, yes, made in Cardiff, and the likes of Duffy,...
Kevin Whately on Dementia
- Posted at 12:02pm
- 27 March 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
- 1 comment
You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a programme title less tempting than Kevin Whately on Dementia (23 March ITV1), but let's try, shall we? How about Giles Brandreth on Shingles or An Audience with Martin Shaw?
No, I think Mr Whately edges it. No offence to him, but we know to our cost that actors make dreadful presenters. I hate to drag up Extreme Fishing with Robson Green again, but it's an obvious whipping boy, and short of Five commissioning Extreme Embroidery with Trevor Eve, likely to remain in a class of its own.
So well done, then, to the 3.6...
The Apprentice: Week One
- Posted at 1:27pm
- 26 March 2009
- by PaulJones-RT
- 5 comments
Ominous classical music? Check. Grim-faced candidates striding purposefully across bridges? Check. Said candidates making absurd claims about business prowess and ruthlessness? Oh, yes. Sir Alan bellowing that his TV show is the hardest thing anyone in the world has ever done, ever? YES! New series of The Apprentice? Bring it on!
But what's this? Has Sir Alan been scribbling down notes behind those frosted glass doors? Because he's got himself some witty new lines: "I'm as hard to play as a Stradivarius," and "I'm looking for a diamond. Well, a diamond started out as a lump of coal." Take that, candidates! "Could be you're here because you're...
Peggy and Archie get married
- Posted at 12:02pm
- 26 March 2009
- by GarethMcLean-RT
- 1 comment
A wedding is like a funeral, except you get to smell the flowers. Assuming you remember to organise the flowers, that is. There's so much to sort out when getting married that you could be forgiven for forgetting to make floral arrangements, and EastEnders' Peggy Mitchell has had more on her plate than Heather at a community centre cheese and wine evening.
If she's not been fretting about her dress (she wanted something razzy; Archie wanted her frock to meet the Taliban's approval), she's been worrying about the bridesmaids, whether or not her far-flung son Grant will turn up (I suspect not) and how much hassle Aunt Sal...
Robert Webb on Let's Dance for Comic Relief
- Posted at 11:17am
- 20 March 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
- 5 comments
I know a number of women - sensible, level-headed ones at that - who've blushingly admitted that they found Robert Webb's winning turn on BBC1's Let's Dance for Comic Relief powerfully erotic.
On any level, this is impossible to analyse. This was, after all, a man dressed as a woman, wearing a hideous black wig, full make-up, a high-cut leotard, legwarmers and shiny tights. And he has sensational legs, the kind of pins that wouldn't disgrace a supermodel. Yet there was no mistaking Webb's, ahem, masculinity, and not just because that leotard left little to the imagination.
There was no doubt that...
Do you act like a dog?
- Posted at 11:01am
- 20 March 2009
- by AndrewCollins-RT
- 1 comment
It's the oldest adage in showbusiness: "Never work with children or adults."
But animals never listen. Dogs, in particular, seem unable to bark "No!" when offered the chance to star alongside a human. Ever since Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, canine actors have risked being upstaged by people walking on two legs.
Look at the gamble Abbey the German shepherd took by agreeing to appear in dystopian sci-fi horror I Am Legend (from Saturday 21 March, Sky Premiere) opposite Will Smith.
Abbey was the newcomer in her first film role, while Smith was well established as a charismatic screen...
Law & Order: UK
- Posted at 4:10pm
- 19 March 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
- 7 comments
In the history of television legal dramas, there surely can't ever have been such a witless, hopeless couple as prosecutors James Steel and Alesha Phillips in Law & Order: UK.
Week after week anyone with even the merest nodding acquaintance with British law must be yelping with laughter at the pair's howling incompetence and sheer idiocy.
One of the highlights for me was in the most recent episode (Monday 16 March) when Phillips (Freema Agyeman, out of her depth) told her boss (Ben Daniels), who was sitting moodily on the steps of the Central Criminal Court having a desultory play on a...
Diversity in the soaps
- Posted at 12:02pm
- 19 March 2009
- by GarethMcLean-RT
Imagine you watched TV and saw no-one like you - no-one in similar circumstances, no-one you recognised, however loosely, as being like yourself. How strange would that be?
Now imagine that you don't have to imagine. For significant swathes of the population, their experiences have only lately been portrayed with even vague realism on TV. People from ethnic minorities, gay men and lesbians, people with disabilitise…accurate representations of such individuals are fewer and further between than they should be in a society as diverse as the UK.
Soaps are at the forefront of TV's attempts to reflect the changing nature of Britain. The interest in the recent...
The Apprentice: interrogating Sir Alan
- Posted at 12:29pm
- 18 March 2009
- by VincentGraff-RT
- 2 comments
As a new bunch of Apprentice wannabes head to the boardroom for a grilling, we turn the tables on Sir Alan Sugar by asking a dozen friends of Radio Times to interrogate the grand inquisitor.
Dave Gorman (comedian): Sir Alan, do you really insist on being called 'Sir Alan'?
"No, not at all. I've stopped my wife calling me Sir Alan now. But people I've never met before should call me Sir Alan. It's got nothing to do with having a knighthood or anything like that. People shouldn't call me Alan if they don't know me. I felt like this when I was Mr Sugar....
The Apprentice candidates announced
- Posted at 5:23pm
- 17 March 2009
- by PaulJones-RT
- 25 comments
With just over a week to go until the new series of reality business show The Apprentice kicks off (Wednesday 25 March, BBC1), we reveal the latest batch of candidates set to face Sir Alan Sugar across the boardroom table.
To learn more about the aspiring apprentices, and to see what they look like, click on the names below. Then tell us your thoughts and predictions.
Rocky Andrews, 21, sandwich chain owner
Debra Barr, 24, a senior sales consultant
Noorul Choudhury, 33, a science teacher
Ben Clarke, 22, trainee stockbroker
Kimberly Davis, 33, marketing consultant
Soap weddings
- Posted at 6:35pm
- 13 March 2009
- by GarethMcLean-RT
An invitation to the nuptials of Coronation Street's Steve McDonald and Becky Granger was, at the very least, a summons to bedlam, even by the standards of Soapland. Were you to devise a measurement on which to gauge the inauspiciousness of soap weddings, it would range from one to ten, where one is the bride running late and ten is the groom being declared dead before the end of the reception.
The latter was the case when Rosemary Sinclair and Tom King wed in Emmerdale on Christmas Day 2006. After his almost-marriage to Charity Dingle the year before - when he jilted her at the altar,...
Ken and Martha in Coronation Street
- Posted at 6:17pm
- 13 March 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
- 6 comments
There was a lovely moment in a recent Coronation Street when Deirdre Barlow surveyed her life of serene domesticity during a happy bout of ironing. All chez Barlow was perfect, but for one little wrinkle in the checked tablecloth of Deirdre's existence: "If only our Tracy was out of prison, it would be just perfect." No sadness attached itself to this particular sentence; it wasn't weighed down by the ballast of sentimentality. Deirdre simply went back to ironing husband Ken's shirts.
Ken looked pained, and not because Deirdre had so carelessly mentioned his incarcerated stepdaughter. No, Ken was pinpricked by guilt because he's in the throes...
The Mentalist
- Posted at 5:00pm
- 12 March 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
- 15 comments
If there are any House fans out there who are eagerly awaiting the arrival of series five - you're out of luck, I'm afraid. In the normal course of events, House would have returned roughly about now, but it's been bumped back until at least the autumn.
This isn't good news for House fans, though from being a devotee in the very early days, love between House and me died some time ago when I became increasingly exasperated by its tiresome repetition because the same thing happened every single week.
Anyway, this gap in the schedules has left a neat and convenient berth for Five's...
Finally: an Oscar for Martin Scorsese
- Posted at 11:44am
- 11 March 2009
- by AndrewCollins-RT
Only a very bad fella who lived on a particularly mean street would have denied Martin Scorsese his well-earned Oscar moment in 2007, when, after half a lifetime as one of American cinema's presiding greats, he finally won best director – and a standing ovation.
Having expanded upon the formative Italian-American influences of his upbringing in Queens, he's created a broad-ranging, exquisitely crafted portfolio spanning documentary, costume drama and religious epic. To see the statuette handed to him by contemporaries Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas was to see movie justice done.
What a shame it was for The...
Red Riding
- Posted at 2:50pm
- 06 March 2009
- by PaulJones-RT
- 4 comments
It wasn't the explicit gore-fest we've come to expect from the modern British serial killer drama, but Red Riding was just as brutal and far more disturbing than most.
Set in 1974, this first of three two-hour episodes adapted from David Peace's quartet of novels plunged us into a world where almost the entire police force of West Yorkshire (not to mention the journalists!) were corrupt and murderous.
So violence and malevolence pervaded the story, rather than being delivered in measured doses of blood and guts. Emotionally draining, yes. But tremendously gripping also.
Red Riding is a subtly innovative police drama....
More
CHOOSE BLOG
LATEST POSTS
-
- Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars preview
- Fri 06 November 2009, 6:10pm
-
- David Tennant to star in US comedy drama
- Tue 03 November 2009, 11:40am
-
- Strictly Come Dancing: week seven
- Mon 02 November 2009, 3:30pm
-
- The X Factor: week eleven
- Mon 02 November 2009, 12:25pm
-
- The week in soapland
- Sun 01 November 2009, 4:30pm
LATEST COMMENTS
-
- Strictly axes Sunday-night show
- "In the past the only thing that…"
- Fri 06 November 2009, 5:40pm
-
- Arlene Phillips to leave Strictly Come Dancing?
- "How can someone who was a…"
- Fri 06 November 2009, 3:24pm
-
- Arlene Phillips to leave Strictly Come Dancing?
- "Absolutely agree with all that's b…"
- Fri 06 November 2009, 3:17pm
BLOGS ARCHIVE
ADVERTISER LINKS