Watching a BBC television programme on the history of the UK and the European Union the other night (Europe: Them or Us), I noted the great amount of archive footage used and how skilfully it had been woven into the argument. I looked, as I always do on such occasions, at the credits, to seeRead More
What sad news that there is to be no second series of Dickensian, the superlative mashup of Charles Dickens’ characters by Tony Jordan, the Eastenders writer. Over twenty episodes the series ingeniously wove together back stories to Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Bleak House and A Christmas Carol, together with several other characters taken from Dickens’sRead More
373. I remember newsreels. 374. I remember Vijay Amritraj, whose always seemed to go out at the quarter final stage of Wimbledon in the most entertaining game of the tournament. 375. I remember Pinky and Perky. 376. I remember The Raging Moon, in which the lead characters were in wheelchairs. 377. I remember Fattypuffs andRead More
It’s all Shakespeare at the moment; inevitable, I guess. And so to the Cockpit Theatre in London, a community theatre tucked away off Lissom Grove, to see a Hamlet that we seldom see – the ‘bad quarto’ Hamlet. There are three different surviving versions of Shakespeare’s play, much to the confusion and secret joy ofRead More
The film programmers among you (real and imaginary) will have noticed that 2016 sees the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and there is an obligation to show something of the man’s works on your screens. With a heavy sigh you turn to the obvious Branaghs and Oliviers, with just maybe Forbidden Planet (perhaps the best-knownRead More
The screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride) wrote one of the essential books on Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Among its many words of wisdom about how movies actually work, the most celebrated are those that express what he calls “the single most importantRead More
One of the first posts that I wrote on this blog back in 2012 was one announcing the closure of BardBox, a blog devoted to online Shakespeare videos which I had established in 2008. The plan was to cut back on the several websites that I was managing and to concentrate the writing on aRead More
I went to the cinema this afternoon to see Spotlight, and I was very impressed. It is fully deserving of its Academy Award. It is not only a gripping, sobering account of priestly child abuse in Boston, but champions the noble practice of investigative journalism, highlighting the best of newspapers at a time when theRead More
Judi Dench played Barbara in Major Barbara (1962) with Edward Woodward who played Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (1971) with Jenny Agutter who played in Hedvig Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1971) with Denholm Elliott who played Alan Quine in Donkey’s Years (1980) with Penelope Keith who played Amanda Prynne in Private Lives (1976) withRead More
I’m going to start up an occasional series. It’ll bring together web resources on a particular theme. Often it will be triggered by a new resource that I will have come across, and then added links to other such sites to fill out the picture. And I promise (to myself) to keep the accompanying textRead More