• Nicholas Lyndhurst joins cast of ‘Frasier’ sequel

    Nicholas Lyndhurst joins cast of ‘Frasier’ sequel

    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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  • Happy belated 68th, Rowan Atkinson!

    Happy belated 68th, Rowan Atkinson!

    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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  • 60 years later, European NYE staple, ‘Dinner for One’, to get prequel treatment in 2023!

    60 years later, European NYE staple, ‘Dinner for One’, to get prequel treatment in 2023!

    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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  • “The same procedure every year” — ‘Dinner for One’ continues its annual NYE tradition in Germany

    “The same procedure every year” — ‘Dinner for One’ continues its annual NYE tradition in Germany

    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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  • ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas — ‘Red Dwarf’-style

    ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas — ‘Red Dwarf’-style

    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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  • ‘Fawlty Towers’ rehearsal script with unshot lost scene discovered!

    ‘Fawlty Towers’ rehearsal script with unshot lost scene discovered!

    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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  • Happy 88th, Dame Judi Dench!

    Happy 88th, Dame Judi Dench!

    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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  • ‘Detectorists’ to place new Christmas special under the tree this holiday season on BBC2!

    ‘Detectorists’ to place new Christmas special under the tree this holiday season on BBC2!

    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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  • Derek Royle — a 30+ yr career that included one episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’

    Derek Royle — a 30+ yr career that included one episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’

    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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