• Sixth series and Christmas special confirmed
• There almost certainly will be a Tom Baker Big Finish play
• From the new series press launch, a video interview with Matt Smith…
• …and a video interview with Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, including a clip from the first episode

• Final Destination 5 a go
• Jamie Foxx joins Bruce Willis on Kane and Lynch
• Trailer for Predators
• New trailer for Kick-Ass
• Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher join Ivan Reitman's Friends with Benefits
• Film rights to Andy McNab's Nick Stone series acquired
• Tim Burton doing 3D stop-motion Addams Family movie

British TV

• Lucy Gaskell joins Casualty
• Adam Crozier to earn at least £1m a year at ITV [subscription required]
• Justified acquired by Five USA
• Wii and iPhone now responsible for 4% of iPlayer views each
• John Pilger to make Afghanistan documentary for ITV1 [subscription required]

Canadian TV

• Lots of money spent on US shows

US TV

• Beau Bridges to co-star in The Rockford Files
• Skeet Urich gets a pilot
• Ashley Tisdale to star in Hellcats
• Human Target's ratings hold up
• BSG's Michael Trucco to recur on Castle
• A returning True Blood character [spoilers]

It had to happen. You don't think I could continue this epic nostalgia-fest without mentioning cult kids' TV show Monkey, do you?

For the uninitiated, Monkey (aka Monkey Magic) was a Japanese kids show that aired on BBC2 in the 80s, dubbed (with a couple of exceptions) by English actors such as Miriam Margolyes doing dodgy Japanese/Chinese accents.

It was based on a Chinese story about the Monkey king and his travels with a priest to recover some Buddhist scrolls, aided only by his natural cunning, a water monster and a pig-man and being a Japanese show it was completely mental: a combination of humour, surrealism, fight scenes and Buddhist philosophy.

For your delectation, the explanatory weird title sequence is below, but I've included a "best bits of" video as well. See if any of it makes sense to you.

• Steven Moffat offers Steven Spielberg the chance to direct an episode
• Karen Gillan reveals more about her character, as well as her inability to do anagrams [spoilers]

Films

• Peter Mullan to star in The Lion Inside
• Glee/Heroes' Jayma Mays to star in The Smurfs…
  
• …with Hank Azaria playing Gargamel
• Spooks' David Oyelowo to play Martin Luther King
• Amanda Seyfried to star in McG's The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League
• Trailer for Jason Statham's The Mechanic
• Trailer for The Romantics
• Reese Witherspoon signs up for blog-based The Pioneer Woman
• A Tron: Legacy set visit or two (with pics) [spoilers]

British TV

• Five to go HD on Sky
• Five won't help FlashForward if it's cancelled

• CTV acquires The Borgias

US TV

• Larry Charles creating Steve Jobs satire
• Pilot casting
• Brotherhood's Jason Clarke to star in Shawn Ryan's Ride-Along
• 24's Howard Gordon to adapt Israeli format Prisoners of War
• Justified FX's second biggest debut ever
• Daylight savings time continues to cause ratings drop
• Robert Wisdom to appear in Burn Notice [spoilers]
• James Marsters joins the Hawaii Five-O pilot
• Jane Espenson to write for Game of Thrones

• Sigourney Weaver joins Vamps
• Rose McGowan joins Conan

British TV

• Virgin to offer HD for free [subscription required]

US TV

• White Collar's Natalie Morales joins Parks and Recreation
• Goran Visnjic to star with Katee Sackhoff in pilot, Dougray Scott and Molly Parker to star in another pilot + more casting
• Tom Selleck to get a pilot?
• The Pacific starts with 3.1m viewers
• Trailer for David Simon's Treme
• Chuck gets all-time lowest ratings
• Ashley Scott joins NCIS

• Behind the scenes of the new series [spoilers]
• An interview with Karen Gillan

Film

• Orlando Bloom and Jonathan Rhys Meyers join Albert Nobbs
• Paul Bettany and Rufus Sewell join The Tourist

• Trailer for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

British TV

• BBC to launch second Freeview HD service because Five can't?
• BBC shouldn't have bid on Harper's Island [subscribers only]
• Sci Fi HD coming to Virgin
• ITV1 HD also coming to Sky

US TV

• SyFy working on Three Inches, Alphas and another BSG spin-off
• Mia Maestro to star in Cutthroat + more pilot casting
• Actor leaving True Blood for The Good Wife?

Canal+ has released some more pictures and videos from season three of Engrenages (BBC4's Spiral). I can't embed the videos so you'll have to go to the Canal+ web site for them, but here are the pics. Looks like there's a new female cop on the scene at the very least.

[From the Armando Ianucci Show, via @thejimsmith]

• Judy Greer, Robert Forster and Beau Bridges join George Clooney on The Descendants

Radio

• Just under 8,000 complaints about 6Music closure

British TV

• ITV to launch ITV1 HD on Virgin
• Skins gets two more series and another new cast
• BBC1 to make four-night siege drama
• Sky to launch Hallmark Channel HD
• Kevin Bishop Show returning?

Canadian TV

• MovieTime goes HD

US TV

• Casting on Lights Out and Hung, plus a departure on White Collar [spoilers]
• Colm Feore to star on The Borgias
• Sarah Shahi's Facing Kate gets a series order
• BSG's James Callis to join Eureka
• Mary Steenburgen to star in Southern Mom, Xander Berkeley joins Nikita + more casting
• Summer Glau joins The Cape
• Annabeth Gish joins FlashForward
• Paul Schneider leaving Parks & Recreation as a regular
• Guy Pearce, Evan Rachel Wood and Melissa Leo join Kate Winslet on Mildred Pierce
• Julie Roberts to guest on Glee?

• Wii game a go

Film

• Hugo Weaving to play the Red Skull in Captain America?
• Trailer for Shrek Forever After
• Sam Worthington to play Dan Dare?
• Leonardo Da Vinci – action hero?
• Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman to star in Change Up

Radio

• What the Beeb plans to do after closing 6Music and the Asian Network

British TV

• Sky looking for 13-part dramas [subscription required]

US TV

• Firefly/Dollhouse's Alan Tudyk to co-star on Rockford Files
• Pilot casting, including Malcolm McDowell in Franklin & Bash
• John Voight signs up for Fox's Midland
• Katherine Heigl to be released from Grey's Anatomy
• Michael Madsen to guest on 24
• Grace Park and Moon Bloodgood to guest on Human Target
• Nurse Jackie season two trailer

• Gary Oldman, Malin Akerman, Harvey Keitel and Milo Ventimiglia to star in Criminal Empires for Dummys (sic)
• Guy Ritchie working on King Arthur film

British TV

• Lenora Crichlow cast in BBC3 comedy Dappers
• Ashes to Ashes series three press pack
• Living acquires Drop Dead Diva [subscription required]
• 196 of the 890 programmes put out by S4C are rated as having zero viewers

US TV

• 24's Elisha Cuthbert joins Happy Endings
• Pilot casting, including The Wire's Sonja Sohn on Body of Evidence
• Amy Acker to guest on Human Target

Film

• John Krasinski to star in Something Borrowed
• Viggo Mortensen replaces Christoph Waltz as Sigmund Freud on Cronenberg's The Talking Cure
• Kevin Macdonald to direct Murder Mystery

British TV

• Blue Murder cancelled
• George Gently back for two episodes
• Pics from Sherlock

US TV

• Judy Greer joins Tax Men, Jerry O'Connell joins Defenders, Jason Biggs join True Love and Madchen Amick joins Pleading Guilty
• Jimmy Smits gets another legal drama
• Keri Russell to join Will Arnett in Wilde Kingdom?
• Precious's Gabourey Sidibe joins The Big C
• Spartacus halts production of second season
• Trauma returns with low ratings
• SyFy to update Little Red Riding Hood
• Numb3rs' Navi Rawat to guest on Castle
• 24 may only have two days to live
• Pics of John Barrowman in Desperate Housewives

• An interview with Matt Smith
• Bus with Matt Smith and Karen Gillan to tour the UK

Film

• Liam Hemsworth joins Arabian Nights
• Proper trailer for Tron: Legacy
• The Book of Genesis: 3D
• Trailer for American: The Bill Hicks Story

Theatre

• Laurence Fishburne's Riff Raff coming to the Arcola Theatre

British TV

• Bravo acquires Spartacus: Blood and Sand
• Film4 HD and E4 HD to launch only on Virgin [subscription required]
• Men outnumber women two to one on TV
• True Blood gets 206k
• Benidorm back for fourth series – one ep possibly live

Canadian TV

• Canadian viewers prefer really bad sitcoms to drama

US TV

• Brittany Snow and 24's Sarah Wynter join pilots
• Lennie James joins Hung + more
• Nick Nolte to join Lucky?
• Heroes' Sendhil Ramamurthy joins Covert Affairs
• Jean Smart joins Hawaii Five-O, Tom Cavanagh joins Edgar Floats
• Numb3rs' Rob Morrow joins The Whole Truth
• Coby Bell joins Burn Notice as a regular [spoilers]
• Brothers and Sisters gets a fifth season [spoilers for Lost]
• American Idol's Katherine McPhee turns down Trauma in favour of Community

Being Human famously started as one of six pilots on BBC3 in a competition designed to find new series. Thanks to a bit of rigging by BBC3, the thankfully forgotten Phoo Action won and was commissioned for a series before the rest of the pilots even aired. Except it was horrid, and obviously rubbish in comparison to Being Human so by the end of that year, at some expense to BBC3, Phoo Action had been cancelled and Being Human picked up for a series.

Trouble was, by that time, two of the three stars of Being Human were unavailable since their options had run out, so their parts were recast; Julie Gardner also says that once they lost the actors, they decided to take the show in another direction and the way Mitchell the vampire and Annie the ghost were portrayed in the pilot was too different from what they wanted.

Finding the pilot is now quite hard: it's not been rebroadcast since the series proper was commissioned; it's not been shown in the US; it's not been included on any DVD releases; and although it's been posted twice on YouTube, it's been taken down at the BBC's request. I've a copy, but then I'm lucky (anyone want one, provided they don't work for the BBC?)

Intriguingly, though, a deleted scene from episode eight of series two has just been posted by the BBC and it's a flashback to the pilot episode – except with the new cast. It's got more or less the same dialogue and you can see how odd it all feels with the new Mitchell.

Here it is, together with two of the pilot's scenes that still survive on YouTube. Wonder if they'll ever release it – or redo the whole thing with the new cast?

• The Sarah Jane Adventures gets two more series
• Series five to be fairy-tale like

Film

• Police Academy to be revived
• Pet Sematary to be remade
• Rome movie moving forward
• Trailer for The Runaways with Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett

British TV

• MTV acquires The Secret Life of the American Teenager and Sweet Valley High [subscription required]
• Being Human creatives want to launch production company, have new idea for a show [subscription required]
• BBC4 to go back to its high-brow roots [subscription required]

US TV

• Casting, including Jeri Ryan on Body of Evidence, Robert Patrick on Edgar Floats and Nate Corddry on Our Show
• Scott Caan to play Danno on Hawaii Five-O
• Smallville gets a 10th season
• NBC's Angela Bromstad discusses the chances of Chuck and Heroes returning
• 24 on the bubble still

The US remake of Spaced didn't get anywhere. Now a four-minute chunk of the pilot has emerged and you can see why.

[via]