Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci
Writer/Director: Nora Ephron
Price: £19.99 (Amazon price: £12.98)
Released: March 8th 2010

Calling all foodies! Slight departure from the normal TMINE fare, I know, but I refuse to be confined to one little box - here's your chance to win a copy of Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep as famous US TV chef (ah, see the TMINE link now?) and writer Julia Child and Amy Adams (you know, off Enchanted, Sunshine Cleaning et al) as a blogger who tries to make all the recipes in Childs' magnum opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year.

Review and competition details after the trailer.

In the US/UK: Sometime in 2010
Available from Amazon.co.uk on BluRay import

The Cylons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan.

Unfortunately for them, it's rubbish, and they can't make up their minds about what to do. At least, that's what Battlestar Galactica: The Plan appears to suggest. A final "milk it for all it's worth" effort before it becomes impossible to get the actors in the same place, it's more like a director's commentary than a worthwhile addition to a TV classic's range.

In the US: SyFy, 2010
In the UK: Sky One, 2010

I'm confused. This is a review of a DVD that contains an extended version of the pilot episode of Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica, which won't be transmitted until next year. So is it a preview or a review?

Whatever it is, let's begin.

Science fiction is a lot of things to a lot of people. It can be space exploration, like Star Trek; it can be alternative reality fare like Eureka; it can be science extrapolation like The Six Million Dollar Man.

Battlestar Galactica is loosely credited with revitalising science fiction, taking the dull, lifeless and artificial people and situations of Star Trek and replacing them with a dark, gritty, quasi-realistic examination of the horrors of war. But BSG only really addressed one category of science-fiction.

Caprica takes away the war, combat and exploration of BSG to revitalise another vein of science fiction: what another, futuristic society might be like. More of a soap opera concerned with relationships and the nature of belief and society than with spaceships and war, Caprica isn't really like anything you've seen before - although it's probably like something you might have read.

The burning question: do we have a soul and if we do, can it be copied?

The story of Merlin and King Arthur has been around for centuries, so it's not surprising that every so often, someone wants to retell it*. Most recently, we've had the BBC series Merlin, but there have been numerous other retellings including the Sam Neill mini-series Merlin, the movie Excalibur, the Clive Owen historical, King Arthur, and mild American 70s sitcom Mr Merlin.

Back in the 80s though, there was a more subtle adaptation of the myth set in modern times. Starring Patrick Malahide (Minder et al) as the Merlin-esque 'Magnus' and Stephen Dillane (Hamlet, Spy Game, Welcome to Sarajevo) as Nick, the King Arthur of the piece, The One Game posited the question: "What would have happened if Arthur had been made King with Merlin's help - and then Arthur had kicked him out?"

This being the 80s, however, for the retelling Nick was the MD of a games company and Magnus was the creator of his best-selling game, thrown out and sent to a mental asylum after he couldn't handle Nick's rejection of his newest invention. Magnus escapes from the asylum and using his near-magical skills, steals all Nick's company's assets and plans his further revenge.

What made The One Game so interesting and worthy of being described as a Lost Gem was its then-unique concept: during the course of the four episodes, set over a Bank Holiday weekend, everyone Nick meets - including friends and loved-ones - and everything he does and comes across may be part of 'The One Game', a live-action and possibly deadly game invented by Magnus to teach Nick a lesson.

It was only ever shown once on ITV1, was released on DVD but is no longer available. It's The One Game and it's a Lost Gem. Here's the the opening titles to the second episode, Saturday, complete with theme tune sung in Patagonian Welsh and annoying 80s narrator recapping just enough of the plot for you to know what's going on.

You wouldn't know it from the BFI's celebration of 25 years of Channel 4 and S4C, but S4C does in fact produce television programmes, some of them quite good. Have a look at Caerdydd. Go on. It's good.

But it would be a mistake to think this is a recent development. A case in point is A Mind to Kill, Wales' answer to Taggart. Starring Welsh man-god Philip Madoc as widower Detective Inspector Noel Bain, A Mind to Kill was a dark and gritty 1991 TV movie about neo-Nazis set and filmed in South Wales.

Shot in both English and Welsh - as (Noson) yr Heliwr (which, I think means either The Night Hunter or Hunter in the Night. Anyone?) - the film, the charismatic Bain and the series format proved popular enough that a series of sequel films was made, running for five series from 1994 to 2004 - even making the transition to the rest of the UK by airing on Five. Yet almost nobody remembers it.

Praise be, then, the first series is being released on DVD by Network on March 16th.

Let's face it, vampires are silly. Yes, they are. They so are. Unless you're stuck in some perpetual Twilight of gothdom/Emodom, the whole "vampiredom is cool/mysterious/sexy/dark/a great way to live" should have been replaced in your psyche by vampiredom is "sad/ridiculous/obvious metaphor for oral sex and venereal diseases" years ago.

To be fair, in part, that's because of the daftness of general TV depictions of vampires, which should have put you off them altogether. The vampires on Buffy very quickly became laughable and Angel very rapidly became self-parody. The Marc Warren Dracula adaptation was awful, and no matter how good the 1970s BBC adaptation with Louis Jourdan was, his flapping his way up a wall like an overladen man on a spacehopper was enough to cause hysterics - and not the frightened kind - in any viewer.

But it needn't be so. As Being Human in the UK and to a lesser extent True Blood in the US recently showed, you can do vampires convincingly in this day and age if you do them right.

Ten years ago, Channel 4 did the first - and possibly the best - of the modern vampire stories. Starring Jack Davenport, Susannah Harker and Idris Elba of The Wire, Ultraviolet managed to bring science, intelligence, moral ambiguity, decent characters and all the hallmarks of modern storytelling to the vampire story - all without saying the word 'vampire' once.

Although it's been repeated and issued on DVD, it's hard to get now (although you can watch every episode on YouTube) as it's been deleted, so it's officially a Lost Gem. Here's a shiny fan-produced trailer for you, albeit one with a very bad choice in soundtrack:

If you grew up during the 80s (or even the 70s) in the UK, like me, you were probably subjected to some pretty rubbish teaching programmes during science classes - they were usually narrated by Chris Tarrant, if that helps jog your memory. Joe has just reminded me of the marvellous first series of Look Around You, in which Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz mercilessly and very surreally sent up "television for schools and colleges".

I won't say too much about it, since it really does speak for itself. Here's a scary clip of the 'Helvetica Scenario' from the pilot episode, Calcium, for those that just want a sample.

For those with more time and who liked that taster, here's the entire pilot episode. Be warned, you will feel a palpable sensation of nostalgia within about five seconds if you are over 30 and British.

And here's the Sulphur episode, which is one of my favourites:

If you're in the US, you can watch all the episodes (with a few adverts) on Adult Swim's web site,  since it's currently airing on Sunday nights. If you're in the UK, if you loved it, you can buy the whole series, including pilot episode, on DVD.

There was also a second series that sent up Tomorrow's World and Micro Live, but it wasn't as good IMHO - although it was still pretty hilarious at times. Here's a sample - you can get it on DVD, too.

PS: At no point should you rely on Look Around You for accurate scientific information.

If you've watched enough movies and TV shows, the idea of the 'ticking bomb' should be familiar to you. You know: there's a bomb, it's got to be defused, usually by snipping either a red wire or a blue wire, and there's only a few minutes or seconds to do it in.

Normally, you'll find this in a single episode of a TV show or maybe in the final act of a film and it'll usually be just a regular cop or soldier doing the disarming, rather than a heroic bomb disposal expert – typically they're running late. Equally rarely will the ticking bomb scenario last the length of the entire movie or TV show or the bomb be any more complex than just that red-blue question.

In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of Danger UXB and occasionally The Unit really focusing on bomb disposal on TV; in the movies, even Speed didn't dwell on disarmament, only evasion, and Quatermass and the Pit didn't have a bomb, only a spaceship everyone thought was a bomb.

Juggernaut (also known as Terror on the Britannic), released in 1974, is perhaps the only instance of a movie that deals exclusively from beginning to end with the defusal of a single bomb and that features a heroic bomb disposal expert at the centre of the action.

Set on board a luxury liner travelling across the Atlantic, the movie sees Richard Harris try to disarm seven identical and highly complicated bombs designed by a man calling himself 'Juggernaut'. The first film to develop the 'red wire/blue wire' dilemma, it's a tense piece directed by Richard 'Superman II' Lester, with dialogue by Alan 'Beiderbecke' Plater, that while featuring an all-star cast is in reality a mesmerising monologue by Harris and a musing on the nature of death. It's a movie you should own.

Here's the very 70s, slightly judgemental trailer narrated by a bored American man.

Do you know what my wife said when she saw this had arrived through the post? "Oh, lush."

I'm not saying she is Joanna Page or Stacey, just that sometimes the similarities get a little spooky.

Anyway: Gavin & Stacey, bit of a sleeper hit during its first series on BBC3, won surprising amounts of awards, then suddenly went through the roof during series two, which went on to win even more awards.

Now series two is going to be repeated on BBC1 (starting this Friday) just in time for a Christmas special, also to be aired on BBC1, and for this DVD release.

It's a lovely little sitcom about a girl from Wales and a boy from SE England who meet, fall in love and get married (rings some bells. Hmm). But as the tag line almost says, it's not just the two of them and the story is as much about their best friends and family as it is about them.

This should probably be called The Other The Other Boleyn Girl, given there's a multi-million dollar effort with Eric Bana, Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman out on DVD right now, too. Also based on Philippa Gregory's book of the same, this is a study of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn's elder sister and fellow mistress of Henry VIII. Made for the BBC in 2003 and starring Natasha McElhone, Jodhi May, Jared Harris and Steven Mackintosh, it's cheaply made yet more powerful and more innovative that its highly turgid American cousin.

It's quite a traumatic tale, with happy newlywed Mary finding that the king's interested in her and that both her husband and her father want her to take up with the King to advance their standing in court. Reluctant at first, not least because she regards adultery as a terrible sin, Mary eventually falls in love with Henry and as history recounts, it all goes pear-shaped after that.

The adaption is relatively faithful to the book, although it does skip over big chunks of the narrative - unlike Hollywood, however, the BBC adaptation does at least make clear where there have been jumps of a year or so, something that made the big screen version less than coherent at times.

You couldn't describe it as historically authentic, though, because despite its best efforts, Gregory's book isn't to be trusted on all its details - rather than being a pious so-and-so as Gregory suggests, most of the records hint that Mary was a bit of a goer - and McElhone is obviously too old to play the teenage Mary. I won't go into the incest stuff either, although Gregory usually does, more or less in every book she writes. Hmmm.

The oddest part of this adaption is that it's shot on grainy video almost as a reality TV show (complete with partially improvised script), with Mary and Anne both offering video diary-like pieces to camera at various parts of the narrative. This more radical approach does involve you, but it also distances, since its fast cuts and shaky-cam mean you spend more time being fascinated by Philippa Lowthorpe's direction than having a chance to get involved with the characters.

McElhone's as good as always; May seems far less devious than other Anne Boleyns you might have seen (on The Tudors for example); Jared Harris, who plays Henry, turns in pretty much the same performance he did in To The Ends of the Earth, which is good in its way but doesn't seem particularly Henry-ish (again, age seems to be a factor); and Steven Mackintosh is okay in a difficult role: the gay, incestuous (as written by Gregory, anyway) brother George Boleyn.

If it's a toss-up between the big-screen version and this one, get this one, if only because it's better and considerably cheaper. But probably only worth getting if you're a big history buff.

EXTRAS
None whatsoever. Cheapskates.

Price: £4.99 (£3.98 from Amazon.co.uk)

Here's the first few minutes to give you an idea of what's it's like:

Incidentally, Philip Glenister's in it as William Stafford, Mary's second husband. Someone's stuck all his appearances in it together and uploaded the result to YouTube. Enjoy!

¡Madre Mia! I've finally got round to writing it. The reasons you should own Manhunter! Will wonders never cease?

As far as most people are concerned, The Silence of the Lambs was the film that introduced serial killer Hannibal Lecter to the world. Starring (Sir) Anthony Hopkins as the ex-psychiatrist and people-eater, it was one of the first horror movies to do respectably at the Oscars and catapulted both Hopkins and Jodie Foster, who played the FBI agent trying to mine him for information, into the league of A-list stars.

Since then, we've had Hannibal and Red Dragon, both starring Hopkins as Lecter, and young Lecter movie, Hannibal Rising - all to diminishing effect.

What not many people realise is that back in the 80s, Michael Mann, director of Heat, Collateral, The Insider and Last of the Mohicans as well as creator of Miami Vice, had already adapted the original Lecter novel, Red Dragon, as Manhunter.

Way before Millennium, Profiler and CSI made popular forensic science, psychological profiling and the idea of thinking inside a killer's mind to catch him, it featured CSI's William Petersen as Will Graham, the man who caught Lecter by risking his own sanity and daring to think the same thoughts. Equally notably, it also featured Brian Cox as Hannibal - and he's a damn sight better than Anthony Hopkins.

Which is why Manhunter is a movie you should own. Here's the original trailer for Manhunter - forgive it for being made in the 80s.

Today's Joanna Page is Bye Bye Harry, a British road movie released in 2006, of which she was the star, and that you will never have seen. Ever. Until now.

We've been jumping all over the place chronologically, here, so let's recap the inexorable career rise of Ms Joanna Page. After leaving RADA in 1999, she went straight to the National Theatre for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She continued to do well in the theatre, with roles in a series of medieval mystery plays, The Mysteries, As You Like It, What the Butler Saw, Aladdin, Doomsday, Camera Obscura, and Billy Liar (with Ralph Little), among others.

The world of film beckoned, too, with bit parts in Miss Julie and This Year's Love, and larger parts in From Hell, Very Annie Mary, Love Actually, and Gideon's Daughter.

And on tele, there were important roles in David Copperfield, The Cazalets, The Lost World, Ready When You Are Mr McGill, Making Waves, Mine All Mine and To The Ends of the Earth. She even found time to fit in a few radio plays and a music video in all that, too.

So by 2005/6, a starring role in a movie looked inevitable. Indeed, in his review of The Mysteries for The Independent, right at the start of her career, Robert Butler prophetically wrote, "As Eve, Joanna Page looks as if (now she's eaten that apple) she will be the love-interest in a movie very soon."

And then it arrived: No Snow which soon became Bye Bye Harry. She's the female lead – arguably the lead. It's a British road movie, a 'dark' rom-com by experienced comedy writer Graham Alborough . It's got noted director Robert Young at its helm. It's got two of the country's biggest rock stars in supporting roles. And when it was released, it featured at the country's leading film festival. 

So why haven't you heard of it until now? And why had you probably not heard of Joanna Page until Gavin & Stacey?

Problem is, I've been linguistically tricky. See, although I said it was a British road movie – and indeed it is, according to the British Council – I pulled a fast one. The bulk of the financing came from Germany and Slovakia. When I said "the country", the country I actually meant was Germany, the rock stars I mentioned were Bela B Felsenheimer and Til Schweiger (very big in Germany), and the film festival I mentioned was the Berlin film festival. 

And it's never been released anywhere else. Not France, not Belgium, not the Netherlands. It's certainly never been shown in Britain. And although you could get a version dubbed into German on rental in Germany, you couldn't get the original English language version until two weeks ago – on import from Amazon.de. 

So without fear of contradiction, may I present for your delight the very first, most comprehensive, most definitive and probably very last English language review of Bye Bye Harry aka Liebling, wir graben Harry aus.

Today's proper Today's Joanna Page is Russell T Davies's Mine All Mine. Stick around Who-ers and Torchwood-ers, this might be about a girl but there's something in it for you as well.

Just kidding. I am awful, aren't I?

Now Russell T Davies has been mentioned rather a lot on this blog and it's not always been positive - which is a little unfair. So I thought I'd first take a moment to give some well deserved praise and thanks to the great RTD.

• Thank you RTD for enlivening children's TV in the 80s and early 90s with shows such as Dark Season and Century Falls.
• Thank you RTD for writing for Touching Evil. While I didn't like the UK version of the show much, the US version, which used your scripts, remains one of my favourite shows of all time.
• Thank you RTD for rescuing us from stultifying conformity by increasing the range and number of gay characters on television, whether in shows you contributed to such as The Grand, or shows you created such as Bob & Rose, Torchwood and, of course, Queer as Folk. The effect can be seen as far afield as Footballers' Wives and Caerdydd
• Thank you RTD for casting David Tennant
• Thank you RTD for bringing back Doctor Who and revolutionising Saturday night television

Most of all though, thank you RTD for your “stealth Welsh” initiative.

The Welsh on television pre-RTD
It's hard to remember what television was like before Russell T Davies. For years, Welsh actors and characters either didn't get a look in or were there for comedy value. Back in the 70s, it was Pobol Y Cwm on BBC1, just before kids television started and that was about it. No, Ivor the Engine doesn't count.

Come the 80s, S4C started up and took Pobol Y Cwm with it. That left mainstream TV with Ruth Madoc in Hi-De-Hi, and the hysterical John Sparkes as Siadwell in Naked Video and in Absolutely. Catherine Zeta Jones's turn in The Darling Buds of May before her move to Hollywood helped up the Welsh profile a bit, but she never played any roles with her own accent - something that's been true for the vast majority of Welsh actors and actresses since. As for shows set and filmed in Wales, they were pretty few and far between - can you think of any?

Then along came Russell T Davies (joined by Julie Gardner later on) with his “stealth Welsh” initiative - his plan to “normalise” the Welsh accent as a feature of British TV shows, get Welsh people represented on-screen and to create a viable TV industry in Wales.

And he's doing it, too. There's Torchwood and Doctor Who filmed in Wales, with Welsh actors and Welsh characters; Gavin & Stacey does likewise, coming in those programmes' “Cool Cymru” wake. They're all some of the most popular programmes on their respective networks (BBC2, BBC1, BBC3).

There's a long way to go still and the scaling back of DW and Torchwood from 13 episodes plus specials to four and five episodes next year respectively, coupled with the impending end of Gavin & Stacey altogether, suggest it could all fall apart again. A certain Joanna Page, for example, has even remarked that's she's been to auditions, asked to do the role in her own accent, and been told "It's fine for you to have any regional accent apart from Welsh". But look how much he's achieved.

No wonder Cardiff is thinking of erecting a statue of the man.

But the first real strike in his “stealth Welsh” plan wasn't with the BBC - it was for ITV. Set in his home town of Swansea, Mine All Mine was a comedy drama starring Griff Rhys Jones as Max Vivaldi, a man who claimed to own the whole city, and a mostly Welsh cast able to use their own accents for once.

Now I really wanted to like this. Just about every possible checkbox was ticked for my liking it: Russell T Davies - check; Swansea - check; Joanna Page - check; Siwan Morris from Caerdydd - check; Griff Rhys Jones - check; Ruth Madoc - check; lots of Welsh people - check; etc.

Yet, even though rewatching it I liked it more than when I watched it the first time, it still wasn't what you could describe as “great”, unfortunately.

First, a couple of public service announcements. You can listen to Joanna Page and Kris Marshall on Tuesday's Daily Mayo (34 minutes, 16MB) talking about Fat Pig, and it turns out that absolutely everything I said about their interpretations of the play was right. I'm a theatre genius. You should listen to it purely for that reason alone, but it's also possibly the only time you'll hear either actor being asked to work out the volume of a hemisphere of radius 10cm. That might float your boat, too.

Our Joanna is also going to be on The Paul O'Grady Show this Friday (5pm C4, 6pm C4+1), discussing Fat Pig again - yes, I belong to a gym that has The Paul O'Grady Show (and Robyn and The Ting Tings) playing 24/7 on its TV screens: why do you ask?

Now, on with Today's Joanna Page, which is To The Ends of The Earth. As you might have gathered by now, I do loves a nice bit of naval fiction, particularly if it's set in the 19th century.

Not all period naval fiction is the same, though. CS Forester's series of books featuring Horatio Hornblower, personified on TV screens most recently by another Welsh god, Ioan Gruffudd, is about ambition, moral values, doing the right thing and the little details of life in the Royal Navy.

The Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian, on which the movie Master and Commander was based, are about many things including the mechanics of sailing, politics and the state of science and medicine during the times of the Napoleonic Wars. But principally they're about the etiquette and social life on board ships and within the Navy. You're stuck on board a ship of war for anything up to a year with a bunch of men who were probably pressed into service, rather than having volunteered, and you have very little to do: how do you keep charge? How do you while away your time?

William Golding's “To The Ends of the Earth” is a trilogy of books that follows young aristo Edmund Talbot as he makes his way down to Australia to become a politician. As you might expect from the author of Lord of the Flies, it's almost the flipside of the Aubrey-Maturin series: Aubrey, Maturin and the crews of the various ships Aubrey commands in the series are all jolly good chaps and fine company, with only a couple of exceptions; “To The Ends of the Earth” asks the more unpleasant question: what if you're stuck on board a ship populated by complete bastards and you're not too well laden with social skills yourself? What do you do then?

Book 1, the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage, concerns the downfall of one of Talbot's fellow passengers, the Reverend Colley and is something of a mystery story - what happened to the Reverend that brought him so low? Close Quarters follows on and concerns an obviously ill Talbot and his instant love for Marion Chumley, a passenger on another ship they encounter. The third book, Fire Down Below, concludes the voyage of the increasingly unreliable HMS Pandora.

In 2005, “To The Ends of the Earth” was turned into a series of three TV movies for BBC2. Guess who they got to play Marion.

In late-'80s Britain, Porterhouse College, Cambridge, is an anachronism, its students uniformly male and (in the vast number of cases) privately educated. When the incumbent Master dies (from a stroke brought on by overeating – a Porterhouse Blue) the government gets its revenge on Porterhouse by appointing as his successor an old graduate, the politician Sir Godber Evans. One of the tiny minority of state-school students the college has had forced on it over the years, Evans returns to his alma mater determined to drag this bastion of privilege into the twentieth century. The elderly academic staff cease their bickering and close ranks against him, but the new Master finds his most implacable and unscrupulous opponent in Skullion, the college porter.

First broadcast in 1987, Porterhouse Blue was based on the book by Tom Sharpe, and starred David Jason, Ian Richardson, John Sessions, Griff Rhys Jones, and a host of top notch character actors. It's still very funny, although even at the time of broadcast, it was satirising a Cambridge University of decades past, rather than the University as it was then: there were no men-only colleges or curfews; you couldn't move for condoms and sex advice being handed out to freshers and research students; and porters mostly rolled their eyes at any 'young gentlemen' who weren't so good at actual work. It's fairer to say it satirised the university's latent tendencies and attitudes with a college of extremes.

Having said that, the real-life Peterhouse College was still a bit weird.

All the same, it's still very well written, funny and some of its points still hit home, whether you've ever been there or not. The students who think they can solve all the world's problems so easily – by banning sex – the academic vs sporty divide: it's all recognisable.

Jason opened everyone's eyes to his acting potential with his portrayal of Skullion, the most fervent of Porterhouse supporters, and Richardson's lefty Master makes an interesting contrast to his later, more famous Machiavellian roles. Sessions is a little bit lacking as the swot who hates all the 'young gentlemen' and has a crush on his bedder, but he still manages to carry the b-plot well. And there's a cracking theme song by the Flying Pickets.

At three hours run-time, it's a little bit of a marathon but one that's probably worth running. No extras to speak of on the DVD, but we're used to that by now from 4dvd.

To win a copy of Porterhouse Blue, as per usual, all you have to do is leave a witty and amusing comment below or plead your case, explaining why you're the most deserving recipient. The deadline for entries is the 18th June 2008. Good luck!

Porterhouse Blue is available for £19.99, but you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk for £9.48.

Disclaimer: I went to Cambridge University. In mitigation, I'll just say that I did go to one of the more rubbish colleges, rather than one of the posher central ones. It's interesting to see, incidentally – despite the fact all the Porterhouse scenes were filmed elsewhere – how much the town has changed, and how much it hasn't. No bike ban on Trinity Street in 1987 for starters...