Conleth Hill jokes ‘there’s no proof’ to claims by co-star Emilia Clarke that he was behind gaffe
The Game Of Thrones actor Conleth Hill has denied being responsible for the show’s coffee cup blunder.
Viewers poked fun at the fantasy epic when a rogue container was spotted on a table during an episode in the final season this year.
Continue reading...The new streaming service may offer the best British dramas in TV history – but it seems hamstrung from the start. We dig into its offering to spare you the bother ... and another subscription
One of the best offerings on BritBox – the new archive streaming site officially launched by ITV and the BBC today – is arguably the greatest single-series British TV drama ever made: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the 1979 BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s espionage novel.
But the opening of another digital bank of programming will confront even the most assiduous viewer with a new parody of the children’s counting song – Netflix, Amazon, Apple, BritBox, Disney, Why?
Continue reading...The actor, director and activist talks about his return to the Stephen King universe and his frustrations with the state of the US
There’s an unmissable sense of the now in the second season of Castle Rock, Hulu’s anthology series recombining the best-known works of Stephen King. The Maine hamlet of Jerusalem’s Lot, first dreamed up by the master of the macabre as a feral vampire stronghold, contends with a more earthbound set of problems in its newest iteration. The opioid epidemic sweeping New England has seeped into town, driving area pharmacists to install locked glass cases for select products. More pressing still is the mounting tension in town between the Somalian immigrant community and the largely Caucasian local populace, each distrustful and fearful of the other. The impending turf war reflects a widening cultural divide in American life, as xenophobic sentiments gain traction with an increasingly vocal faction of reactionaries.
Related: The best Stephen King movies … ranked!
Continue reading...They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?
Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.
Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?
Continue reading...Royal speaks of struggling to cope with her new life in interview for ITV documentary
The Duchess of Sussex has revealed she was warned before her marriage to Prince Harry that the British tabloids would “destroy” her life, as she spoke of struggling to cope with the reality of being part of the royal family.
In an interview for the ITV documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey, she said the last year had been “hard” and that she had had “no idea” of what she would face.
Continue reading...Forster was a versatile character actor whose career was unexpectedly rescued by his Oscar-nominated role in Quentin Tarantino’s cult thriller
Robert Forster, the handsome and omnipresent character actor who got a career resurgence and Oscar nomination for playing bail bondsman Max Cherry in Jackie Brown, died on Friday. He was 78.
Publicist Kathie Berlin said Forster died of brain cancer following a brief illness. He was at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, including his four children and partner Denise Grayson.
Continue reading...Facetious statement comes after reports that show was banned in China after episode critical of the country
South Park’s creators have responded with a mock apology to reports that China has censored the programme, ridiculing the country and comparing President Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh.
The “apology” from Trey Parker and Matt Stone comes after reports on Monday that China had scrubbed all episodes, clips and content related to the long-running comedy cartoon from Chinese streaming and social media platforms in response to a recent episode that was critical of the country.
Continue reading...BBC chat show presenter explains why he stopped writing advice column
Graham Norton has said he stopped writing for the Daily Telegraph because the newspaper’s recent “toxic” political stances increasingly made him feel “nauseous”.
The BBC One chat show presenter wrote the newspaper’s advice column for 12 years before stepping down without explanation at the end of 2018. Norton has now said he decided to leave the outlet after it defended the likes of US supreme court then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh and published articles by future prime minister Boris Johnson containing falsehoods.
Continue reading...The actor says she discussed her part in The Crown with the deceased royal herself
Some actors avoid excessive research, but for Helena Bonham Carter to play Princess Margaret in The Crown meant reading all the biographies, talking to friends, ladies-in-waiting and relatives, and consulting an astrologer, a graphologist and a psychic.
The last meeting meant she could talk to the princess herself, the actor told Cheltenham literature festival.
Continue reading...In this rare glimpse inside the BBC archives, we reveal the exasperated internal memos, the furious letters from wing commanders – and David Frost’s bid to bring them down
In a memo sent in 1969, the BBC head of comedy seems to have lost his sense of humour. “Please will you have a word with the writers?” said Michael Mills. “I haven’t reacted to the funny titles that have appeared on the scripts so far. I hoped that they would cease of their own accord.”
The titles that irritated him included “Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot”, apparently a spoof legal firm, which came to be shortened to Bunwackett. The show, meanwhile, had the working title The Circus. Now, though, Mills had had enough: “The time has come when we must stop having peculiar titles and settle on one overall title … Please would you have words with them and try to produce something palatable?”
Continue reading...Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy was the surprise victor while the final season of HBO’s fantasy drama picked up the most Emmy awards
It was a British invasion at the 71st Emmy awards, with Game of Thrones taking home the prize for best drama and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag sweeping most of the comedy awards in a night that saw numerous nods to stars from across the pond.
The biggest question heading into the night was whether Emmy voters would reward perennial juggernaut Game of Thrones for its divisive final season. The show was nominated for 32 awards – the most for any single season of television ever – and had already won 10 Creative Arts Emmys last week. Game of Thrones took home the night’s final prize for outstanding drama series and a best supporting actor nod for American star Peter Dinklage – bringing its total to 12 awards and breaking its own 2015 record for the most awards given to a series – but was otherwise shut out of the telecast.
Continue reading...From early experiments in claymation TV to its forthcoming Shaun the Sheep big-screen sequel, we rate the animation studio’s output
After it was used for a perfume ad, Nina Simone’s jazz classic made it into the top 10 in the autumn of 1987. Inspired, no doubt, by the (non-Aardman) video for a successful re-release of Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite earlier in the year, this music video became a second bite at claymation-meets-1950s. Peter Lord, who directed, went with a sultry singing cat and some artistic shots of piano keys.
Continue reading...From apocalyptic standup Frankie Boyle to the many hilarious faces of Tina Fey, Steve Coogan, Sharon Horgan and Kristen Wiig, we present the funniest comics of the era
Continue reading...Auckland beats Scotland to NZ$1.3bn contract for what is expected to be the most expensive TV series ever made
New Zealand will reprise its starring role as Middle Earth with confirmation Amazon Studios will film its new Lord of the Rings television series on its shores.
The country – where Sir Peter Jackson filmed the original Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies – beat rival Scotland to be named the production location for the series, set to be the most expensive TV show ever made.
Continue reading...For years, documentary-maker Vanessa Engle has been on the trail of a notorious swindler who escaped from prison and disappeared into thin air. Then one day, the phone rang ...
You probably haven’t heard of Michel Cohen. Do a search and you get Michael Cohen, the Trump fixer who went to jail. Wrong one. Though this one did go to jail, too. He’s French, born in 1953 on an estate in a poor suburb of Paris and his first job was to sell the Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door, which he was very good at.
Cohen later went to the US and started selling French paté, then prints. He got into the art world, became a dealer, sold Picassos, Monets, Chagalls. For a while he lived the dream, drove fast cars, had a house in Malibu with his German wife and two kids, a chef, horses, everything. He got into the options market. That didn’t go so well, so he got into debt. Cohen started to put loans and artworks that weren’t his into the market; the hole got bigger and bigger. In the end he disappeared, having swindled the New York art world out of $50m.
Continue reading...As the dyspeptic old-school entertainer embarks on a tour, his creator Steve Delaney reflects on dedicating his life to one character
Comedy has its careerists: thrusting tyros zeroing in on the fame, the TV gigs, the movie roles. But there are other, more circuitous routes to the top. The fictional Count Arthur Strong certainly took one, via the dog days of vaudeville and bit parts in Hammer horrors. His creator Steve Delaney took one too, meandering from drama school to a carpentry career to the slow gestation of his alter ego, away from the circuit’s bright lights.
The Count is a star now; his sitcom – co-written with Graham Linehan – ran for three series to 2017. But he was once an oddity on the Edinburgh fringe, where I started watching him at the turn of the century – an experience never to be forgotten, for various reasons. Yes, this blithering, dyspeptic old-school entertainer was a creation of near-genius, and Delaney’s blood vessel-busting performance a spectacle to behold. But – wow! – those early shows could be gruelling. The joke was in Arthur’s frustration and confusion, as his own waning powers (of memory, movement, syntax) thwarted this or that overreaching set piece. Often, Delaney took that joke to painful, patience-fraying extremes.
Continue reading...Where’s Mad Men? How did The Sopranos do? Does The Crown triumph? Can anyone remember Lost? And will Downton Abbey even figure? Find out here – and have your say
Jan Stroh built replica studio in his cellar, complete with palm trees and sound effects
A German lawyer who spent 15 years re-enacting episodes of the TV quizshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in his cellar, said his hobby had paid off as he walked away with the top prize this week.
Jan Stroh, 35, even crudely reconstructed the studio of the German version of the programme in the basement of his Hamburg home, complete with palm trees and exotic seascape backdrop, victory glitter and sound effects.
Continue reading...Director says Brexit makes him ‘terminally depressed’ while fellow Python Cleese backs it
Terry Gilliam has said he disagrees with the way his friend and fellow Monty Python member John Cleese sees the world, following comments from the latter endorsing Brexit and criticising the makeup of London.
The Python animator and Hollywood director despairs of Donald Trump and Brexit, both of which make him “terminally depressed”. Cleese has previously faced a backlash for voicing support for the UK leaving the EU, and for saying London was no longer an English city.
Continue reading...Harper was a breakout star on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then the lead of her own series, Rhoda
Valerie Harper, who stole hearts and busted TV taboos as the brash, self-deprecating Rhoda Morgenstern on back-to-back hit sitcoms in the 1970s, has died aged 80.
Longtime family friend Dan Watt confirmed Harper died on Friday, adding the family was not immediately releasing any further details. She had been suffering from cancer for years, and her husband said recently he had been advised to put her in hospice care.
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