THE classic British sitcom Fawlty Towers is being revived and developed by Castle Rock Television with original series co-writer and star John Cleese and his daughter Camilla Cleese set to write and star. Filmmaker Rob Reiner, Michele Reiner, Matthew George, and Derrick Rossi will executive produce the series. According to early reports, the new FT will explore how the over-the-top, cynical […]
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Red Nose Day has to be the single most brilliant example known to man and/or woman of how an entire country demonstrates the ability to rally around a charitable cause. To label Red Nose Day in the UK as a cultural phenomenon is doing it an injustice. It’s an institution. The entire country gets involved. The entire British […]
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Filmed in locations across the West Midlands, the most iconic location, Hyacinth and Richard Bucket’s home, was a quiet family home in Coventry before television crews knocked on the door of current owner Rosemary Healey to ultimately set up shop for what was to become Hyacinth’s famous house, along with her neighbor, Elizaben Warden’s home […]
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It seems as though Frasier Crane has finally re-entered the building as news that the long-awaited Paramount+ sequel to Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier series has begun casting. Nicholas Lyndhurst (Butterflies, Only Fools and Horses, After You’ve Gone, Goodnight Sweetheart, New Tricks) will portray Alan Cornwall, a new character from Frasier’s past. Described as “Frasier’s old college buddy turned university professor, Cornwall is British, he’s boozy, and he’s larger than life.
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Rowan Atkinson turned 68 on Friday. From this end, all we can do is wish him a very Happy Belated Birthday. All he’s done is give the world the gift of laughter over the years beginning with Not the Nine O’Clock News, then Blackadder, Mr. Bean and, finally, The Thin Blue Line. Stops along the […]
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Dinner for Five, set 51 years before the famous birthday party, in the year 1921, at a country house near Eastbourne, East Sussex, is based on a 2002 crime caper by the German author Michael Koglin.
In the prequel, five men vie for the attention of the unmarried and emancipated Miss Sophie, aged 39: Admiral Von Schneider, a Prussian militarist, the adventurer Sir Toby, the French bon vivant Mr Pommeroy, Mr Winterbottom, “an Englishman and colonialist”, and the son of the estate’s butler, James.
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It’s repetitive…it’s predictable…it continues to be brilliantly funny every year and it’s worthy of an annual mention on Tellyspotting every New Years Eve. On the surface, Dinner for One is a short British cabaret sketch from the 1920s that has become a German New Year’s tradition. Whether or not you understand the cultural significance of this, Dinner […]
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Ran across a brilliant piece which combines one of my favorite series with one of my favorite times of the year. Searching half the night trying to find the appropriate person to attribute this to and give credit where credit is due, all I could come up with was that it looks like it was […]
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What reads right out of the April Fool’s Day playbook of the discovery of a ‘lost 13th episode’ of Fawlty Towers, an honest-to-goodness/legitimate rehearsal script with unshot material has been discovered and has been put up for auction. The rehearsal draft for “The Anniversary” episode features several minutes worth of material that was never filmed, including […]
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If it wasn’t the case before, I’m now fully convinced that if you looked up the definition of brilliant in the dictionary, there would simply be a photo of Dame Judi Dench. The Oscar/Tony/BAFTA/Laurence Olivier/Golden Globe/Screen Actors Guild award winner turns 88 years young today and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
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