Hyacinth Bucket, played brilliantly by Patricia Routledge, has spent a lifetime in our collective homes over the years insisting her surname is pronounced Bouquet. She is pretty much a pompous social-climbing snob. Unbeknownst to most neighbor residents of Blossom Lane, Hyacinth originally came from a very poor working-class background. Her main mission in life is […]
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If anyone still questions whether or not British situation comedy is better than its’ American counterpart, one only has to look to the list of pilot comedies coming from American broadcast networks this Fall for verification. In a pitch that must have sounded like it came directly from the lips of Buck Henry in The […]
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With recent word out of London that the BBC is “thrilled” and “delighted” with their initial looks at the early completed episodes with Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor, let’s all put the Downton Abbey countdown calendar on the back burner for the moment, resign ourselves to the fact that Sherlock probably isn’t happening in […]
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Since Jack Bauer is back with 24, and there will be a Spooks feature film in the not-too-distant future, let’s end the debate before it begins.
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Full disclosure up front. I’ve never seen an episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, this goes in the stack of DVD boxed sets of series television gold such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad and West Wing that I have never seen in their entirety. Before you get up and leave the room, I have […]
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Much like death and taxes, the only thing that anyone can truly count on to happen these days is that right around this time of year, two months into filming of the new series marks that it’s open season on the annual Downton Abbey rumor mill. For the past four years, like clockwork, official production […]
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As we reported last Fall, Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, are headed to BBC Two and PBS in 2015. Filming has begun on Wolf Hall, the small screen adaptation of Mantel’s historical Tudor novels which follow the atmospheric rise to power of Cromwell, the powerful minister, within Henry […]
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Captain Mainwaring, Sergeant Wilson and Private Pike are going back on patrol some 37 years after they were last on duty protecting the quiet seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea from a Nazi invasion. Dad’s Army, which starred Arthur Lowe, followed the escapades of the Home Guard platoon during World War II and their efforts as the […]
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After seeing series 1 of Sally Wainwright’s Last Tango in Halifax, I’m convinced that if you looked up the words ‘family baggage’ in the dictionary, you’d see a cast photo. A stellar cast, btw. Headed up by Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid, Last Tango in Halifax also stars Sarah Lancashire and Nicola Walker star as […]
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“Unfortunately, the ’60s didn’t swing for everyone…” Television set in the 60’s these days dials up a pretty high coolness quotient given that, for the most part, our frame of reference is Mad Men or BBC’s The Hour. Mr. Sloane, set in Watford in 1969, however, is at the opposite end of the Earth from […]
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