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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After an excrutiatingly long 5-year absense, Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones are reuniting for a feature-length episode of The Detectorists this holiday season. The series, which follows Andy (Crook) and Lance (Jones), members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club, as they search for historic discoveries across their hometown in north Essex, will return with a most-welcome gift of […]
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Watching Fawlty Towers recently, I got to thinking about all those British actors that had long, successful careers but that, for whatever reason, would be forever known as ‘being in one episode of Fawlty Towers.” I immediately flashed back to the time we had the good fortune to interview Nicky Henson in 2005 for the PBS program, […]
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Tom Owen, who played Tom Simmonite in Last Of The Summer Wine, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 73. Having starred in over 90 episodes of the sitcom between 2000 and 2010, Owen played Tom Simmonite, the long lost son of William ‘Compo’ Simmonite – the character who was played by his real-life father, Bill Owen.
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The Christmas gift-giving season will get started a bit early this year as over the next few months, a number of PBS stations across the country will be giving viewers an early comedic gift of Happy Birthday Mr. Bean, a celebratory documentary looking back at the thirty years since comedy legend Mr Bean landed on our screens. […]
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