Radio and podcasts

Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, Britain’s foremost film critics, have largely been confined to radio – until now. Mysteriously, though, rather than a TV show, they’ve got themselves an iTunes something. I don’t know really what to call it, but they call it Movie Heaven, anyway.

The premise is simple: get a guest on and get them to programme a day’s worth of movies, one of the morning for the kids, one for the afternoon for the family, one for the evening for adults and one for late night that’s got a slight edge to it. First up is Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, and there’s a pretty good selection of films, including Oliver!, in his schedule.

The show’s pretty good, largely because it’s Kermode and Mayo, and Serkis is an entertaining guest. However, it falls apart in its direction. The show is filmed on a cinema set, which works fine when it’s just Kermode and Mayo, but as soon as Serkis comes along, Kermode and Mayo are on one side of the aisle, Serkis on the other, with Kermode stuck awkwardly behind Mayo. You can imagine the whole thing working quite nicely around a table, but because of the choice of set, it feels a bit amateurish. Then again, it only costs 99p a download, so I don’t imagine they could afford much else.

Either way, if you like Kermode and Mayo or you like films, give it a try and try to ignore the production values.