Sunday, 31 January 2010
Gerard Wood
North American fans of the BBC's re-imagined Robin Hood will be pleased to learn that the third season is now available on dvd in a five disc set with over an hour of bonus material, including behind the scenes features, character profiles, video diaries and more. As most will know, this is the final season. The axe fell in July 2009, disappointing many and leaving others wondering what the fuss was about. From the outset this retelling of the Robin Hood legend divided audiences, many enjoying it for its over-the-top sense of fun and its modernity, others dismissing it for having implausible story-lines and for introducing modern concepts outrageously out of joint with the twelfth century setting.
Read more...
Friday, 06 November 2009
John Howell
TV comedy shows don't come any better than Blackadder. It's up there with Fawlty Towers, the BBC's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series and the classic Monty Python. If you're one of its many fans, you'll be happy to hear that Warner Bros. has released a premium DVD version, titled Blackadder Remastered - The Ultimate Edition. This 6 disc collection features new digital restorations of the original program masters, all the specials, and a host of previously unreleased bonus features.
Read more...
Monday, 19 October 2009
Gerard Wood
For those who can recall how close we came in the late 1990s to television series perfection with Chris Carter's Millennium, recent news of a forthcoming movie based on the series was probably greeted with some excitement.
The source of this snippet of news was an article by Niall Browne on Screen Rant and it quickly went viral. The fact that Browne's article was little more than speculation didn't deter many websites and blogs from posting headlines such as Millennium Returns, With Lance - But Without Chris Carter, reminding us once more (as if we could ever forget) how poor journalistic standards on the web can be.
Read more...
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Gerard Wood
Although news of planned adaptations of fantasy fiction for the screen come along fairly often, it’s not often that anything actually eventuates, or if it does, that the wait is worth it. More often than not the news arrives like a bolt of lightning and then proceeds to fade away so slowly that we’re generally still waiting for something to eventuate years after the news first broke (what did happen to the Elric and Shannara movies?).
The upshot is that it’s fairly difficult to become all that excited when news does break of yet another work of epic fantasy making its way to the screen, and to be honest I barely even registered HBO’s purchase of the rights to George R. R. Martin’s award winning fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire back in 2007. But this project has been moving forward unusually fast, and with news this week that Sean Bean has joined the cast as Eddard "Ned" Stark, Warden of the North, and Lord of Winterfell, this adaptation is taking on some real substance. Finally it's worth the attention.
Read more...
Monday, 07 April 2008
John Howell

With the first series of Ashes to Ashes rating so well, the BBC has commissioned a second series to air on BBC One in 2009. Made by Kudos Film and Television, the fantasy drama has averaged well over 6.5 million viewers per episode. The first episode alone achieved audience figures of more than eight million.
Ashes to Ashes stars DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) and DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes).
Read more...
Saturday, 04 August 2007
John Howell

A sequel to Life on Mars titled Ashes to Ashes is in production with the action moving to the 1980s.
Life on Mars tells the story of a modern detective, Sam Tyler, played by John Simms, who is struck by a car and ends up in the 1970s. Instead of being part of a modern police department, he is stuck in his own past and strangely working as a DI in a ‘70s police department instead. Is he in a coma, has he gone mad, or has he really jumped back in time?
Read more...
Thursday, 02 August 2007
John Howell
It's about time someone updated the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story for the 21st century. Created by Jeffrey Taylor, the BBC's new television fantasy drama Jekyll stars James Nesbitt, best know as the lead in the popular UK television series Cold Feet.
Nesbitt plays Tom Jackman, a modern-day descendant of Dr. Jekyll, who has recently begun his unfortunate transformations. He also plays Dr Jekyll's alter ego Mr Hyde.
Read more...
Friday, 27 April 2007
Gerard Wood
It's no easy thing to do something original with the legend of Robin Hood, and it is perhaps a measure of the scarcity of originality that movie and TV studios keep on doing something with it. Frequently. It's no surprise, of course. When there's nothing original to say, the same old things keep on being repeated. Every five or six years it seems there is another attempt to breathe life into the Robin Hood legend on film, whether in a movie or a TV series, with the results falling neatly into three categories: the Good, the Bad and the very, very - Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Read more...
|
|