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The Best…Fawlty Towers moments
- Posted at 4:50pm
- 23 October 2009
- by PaulJones-RT
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Fawlty Towers, BBC Worldwide is featuring a host of hilarious clips from the show - and making both series available to download from iTunes. Here at RadioTimes.com, we've picked out our four favourite Fawlty Towers moments:
4. "Basil. There's a kipper sticking out of your jumper."
Delivering a guest's breakfast to his room, Basil fails to notice that the man is dead. Things go downhill from there…
The Best…Monty Python moments
- Posted at 3:05pm
- 28 September 2009
- by WilliamGallagher-RT
Forty years ago, Monty Python's Flying Circus burst onto television without much attention at all.
Screened on BBC2 from 1969 to 1974, each short series did earn an increasing following, yet it would really only be in the years since that Monty Python would become the incredible phenomenon it is today. Four decades of stage shows, films, books and phrases that have entered the language. It launched the careers of John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin - and is still seen around the world.
With all that, can you...
The Best...Blackadder series
- Posted at 5:10pm
- 08 June 2009
- by LauraPledger-RT
Show me an episode of Blackadder and, as the man himself might say, I'm as happy as Happy Jack McHappy, the winner of this year's Mr Happy competition. Funnier than most comedy shows around, if about as factually accurate as The Tudors, it's simply great entertainment.
All of Edmund's incarnations have something to recommend them - yes, even the much-derided first one. But my all-time favourite series is Blackadder the Third.
As the put-upon butler to the crass and loudmouthed Prince Regent (a gem of a performance by Hugh Laurie), Blackadder is,...
The Best...ER moments
- Posted at 4:45pm
- 22 April 2009
- by DavidBrown-RT
After 15 series of finely crafted trauma, ER is flatlining for ever. In a tribute to all the medics who've walked the emergency room of County General, here's my pick of the ground-breaking drama's best episodes. Do you agree with my choices? Why not post a comment below and let me know. But first of all, pass the kleenex, stat!
1. Love's Labor Lost - series one
Still in its infancy, ER delivers a harrowing, almost unbearably tragic episode that is surely its finest hour. Mark misdiagnoses a pregnant woman and it...
The Best...TV illusionist
- Posted at 3:50pm
- 09 January 2009
- by LauraPledger-RT
You'll like this blog. Not a lot - but you'll like it.
I don't recall much about the television of my childhood, but I do remember being happily bamboozled by Paul Daniels on a regular basis.
Nowadays, TV magic shows have gone the way of so many brightly coloured handkerchieves and sundry rabbits, disappearing into the black hole of the magician's top hat. (Though if David Blaine could be persuaded to follow them, I suspect nobody would really miss him.)
Not so long ago we were treated to the madcap antics of American double act...
The Best…Shooting Stars moments
- Posted at 5:40pm
- 05 December 2008
- by PaulJones-RT
We take a fond look back at some of the most hilarious moments from Vic and Bob's surreal variety show/celebrity panel game.
1. The spectacular musical medley that introduces this Shooting Stars Christmas special kicks off with Vic and Bob's take on a Lionel Richie classic, revisits the theme from Rupert the Bear and concludes with Mark Lamarr's levitating version of Mr Boombastic. Simply stunning.
Watch the clip…
2. Guest Paul Whitehouse valiantly attempts to get a round of drinks in for the Hapsburg King, hampered by some pesky anarchists....
The Best…album covers of all time
- Posted at 2:47pm
- 03 December 2008
- by JaneAnderson-RT
To tie in with BBC Radio 2's programme The Album as Art (Tuesday 16 December, 10:30pm) - part of a season celebrating the album - we've put together a photo gallery of some of the most iconic album covers of all time.
The Beatles - Revolver (1966)
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
David Bowie - Aladdin Sane (1973)
The Clash - London Calling (1979)
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures...
The Best…Bond moments
- Posted at 2:56pm
- 17 October 2008
- by PaulJones-RT
A video-clip countdown of my personal top five 007 film scenes, featuring some acknowledged classics along with some less celebrated gems (plus Alan Partridge's take on the opening scenes of "the best film ever made"). And if you detect a slight bias towards the wooden suavity of Roger Moore, well, what can I say - nobody does it better.
5. You Only Live Twice
A rooftop: Sean Connery takes on all comers, darting and slugging his way through a gaggle of miniature henchmen like a powered-up character in a retro computer game. The jaunty...
The Best...Blue Peter moment
- Posted at 4:55pm
- 06 October 2008
- by DavidBrown-RT
It's so tempting to go for something unintentionally funny when picking the definitive spectacle from Blue Peter's first 50 years. Contenders could have included:
The horrified look on Mark Curry's face when he separated a giant Lego man's head from its body, wrecking in seconds what must have been months of work.
An apoplectic Percy Thrower describing the vandals who wrecked the BP garden in 1983 as "mentally ill" live on television.
A studio full of Girl Guides and Brownies resolutely keeping their posts around a campfire that's steadily growing into an inferno in the...
The Best...Bond villains
- Posted at 6:00pm
- 17 September 2008
- by AndrewDickson-RT
Bond villains. They're usually mad, they're frequently bad, and they're always dangerous to know. In the 21 Bond movies to date, there have been 24 assorted psychopaths and geniuses, each with a dastardly and often earth-threatening scheme. Their one shared goal is the destruction of 007, and the messier his demise, the better. Here's my rundown of the best Bond villains depicted on screen:
5. Karl Stromberg
Appearing in the over-the-top The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Stromberg is best known for planning to destroy the world and build a new one underneath the sea. He doesn't get...
The Best...sketch comedians
- Posted at 3:25pm
- 22 August 2008
- by RhodriMarsden-RT
Anyone who watches comedy programmes with an unhealthy regularity will know that the sketch-show format is frighteningly unreliable. Even the ones that you mark down as your favourites end up coasting - as soon as the comedians figure out that if they can make 20 per cent of it thigh-slapping stuff, they can get away with padding out the rest with familiar catchphrases, shaggy dog stories and the ubiquitous and horrible musical pastiche stuck at the end.
As a result, half-hour skit shows seem to have lost their way, superseded by other comedy formats on the rise...
The Best...X-Files character
- Posted at 4:30pm
- 05 August 2008
- by LauraPledger-RT
The X-Files ran for nine series and, in Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, gave us one of TV's most celebrated partnerships. But in a show rich with well-drawn characters, who else really stood out?
In terms of keeping viewers awake at night, you'd have to go some way to beat Eugene Victor Tooms. Tooms was a killer who would lunge from the smallest of hiding places to tear the livers from his unsuspecting victims with his bare hands. Actor Doug Hutchison endowed this unlikely, bendy-limbed mutant with creepy believability, right up to the moment...
The Best...Olympic moment
- Posted at 12:10pm
- 30 July 2008
- by PaulJones-RT
One of the great things about the Olympic Games is the sheer diversity of sport you get to see. From BMX to baseball, Greco-Roman wrestling to windsurfing, a whole host of weird and wonderful obscurities will be there. And I'll be watching pretty much all of them.
I've always enjoyed the niche sports. I become strangely addicted to muscular munchkins lifting ridiculous weights. Repetitive target sports like archery and pistol shooting always hit the spot too. And during the 2002 Winter Olympics I was watching late-night curling highlights before the British ladies looked like title prospects....
The Best...soap deaths
- Posted at 3:30pm
- 16 July 2008
- by KateCoffey-RT
"Soap death" is a bit of an oxymoron when you think about it. No-one dies in a soap death - they get an upgrade to The Bill or end up on some reality TV show, reinvented as a singer/presenter/ rent-a-celeb. Dead soap characters have even been known to be resurrected in a fleeting attempt to raise ratings, such as EastEnders's comeback king, Den "Hello, princess" Watts.
Anyone who dies twice is worthy of a place in the soap death hall of fame, although in the case of Den Watts's second coming it is difficult to...
The Best...Sherlock Holmes
- Posted at 3:20pm
- 03 July 2008
- by DavidBrown-RT
It's one of the most famous silhouette profiles in history: the aquiline nose, the meerschaum pipe and the deerstalker hat. But of all the actors to shed light on Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation, who can best lay claim to that bohemian consulting room in Baker Street?
Basil Rathbone portrays him as a smooth sophisticate, while Peter Cushing - in emphasising the sleuth's scholarly bent - ends up downplaying his wilder excesses. It is really only Jeremy Brett, in the Granada television adaptations of the 1980s and 90s, who fully captures the...
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