Happy St Patrick’s Day, Frank McCourt

Regular readers of Tellyspotting may recognize this post from several years ago. It’s worth repeating so bear with me today as St. Patrick’s Day just isn’t the same without Frank. Several years ago, we had an incredible opportunity to spend several of weeks ‘working’ in Dublin with Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Angela’s […]

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Behind the scenes with ‘Inspector George Gently’

Starring Martin Shaw (Judge John Deed) as Gently and Lee Ingleby (Our Zoo) as DS John Bacchus, Inspector George Gently, the period crime drama, will return in 2015 with four new feature-length films set in 1969. Lisa McGrillis (Hebburn) also returns as WPC Rachel Coles. At this point, word out of the UK is that Inspector George […]

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The doors of ‘Mr. Selfridge’ to remain open for a 4th series!

With American audiences ever so close to the return of Mr. Selfridge for the third series as part of PBS’ Masterpiece series, ITV has announced that the series will return for a fourth season in 2016! Ten new episodes have been commissioned with Jeremy Piven returning as the colorful but deeply troubled Harry Gordon Selfridge […]

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R.I.P. Terry Pratchett — creator of ‘Discworld’ dies at 66.

R.I.P. Terry Pratchett — Discworld has stopped spinning…. As sentiments on Twitter have poured in from around the world, the above tweet, which easily came in under the 140-character limit, seemed to say it all. The literary world is a much lonelier place today as Terry Pratchett, the mind palace that created the brilliant Discworld series […]

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It’s an early St. Patrick’s Day #TBT with ‘Dave Allen at Large’

Not long after Monty Python’s Flying Circus premiered on KERA-TV in Dallas, one of my earliest memories of watching British comedy on public television was to ‘religiously’ watch Dave Allen at Large. A somewhat non-descript sketch comedy series featuring an intellectually brilliant Irish comedian that sat in a high bar stool with a seemingly bottomless glass of […]

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After having ‘The Worst Week of My Life’ and experiencing ‘Death in Paradise’, Ben Miller says, ‘I Want My Wife Back’

Figuratively, not literally, it’s been a rough decade for the characters that Ben Miller has played so brilliantly. In Worst Week of My Life, Ben’s character, Howard Steel, made it standard practice to put himself in absolutely dreadful situations and proceed to make things worse by trying to either put things right or explain what […]

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Nicola Walker & Sanjeev Bhaskar set to star in ITV’s Unforgotten

First off, ITV had me with the headline, Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar to star in Unforgotten, but when they added the tag line, “Two can keep a secret – if one of them is dead“, I began clearing space on my DVR for when it premieres. Starring Nicola Walker (Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax, Scott & […]

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Duchess of Cambridge to check out downstairs at ‘Downton Abbey’

As hard as it is, post-Downton Abbey, life can be good as long as there is a steady stream of news from the production set where cast and crew are currently filming series 6. Especially, if the first bit of news arrives only one week removed from the finale of series 5 was broadcast on PBS’ Masterpiece series. […]

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