UK TV

An archive of blog entries about UK TV programmes and production.

Wednesday’s question-answering news

5 March 2008 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

Doctor Who

Film

Commercials

British TV

US TV

Tuesday’s early renewals news

4 March 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Film

British TV

US TV

Monday’s Kung Fu master news

3 March 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Film

British TV

US TV

Arcadia: from the makers of The IT Crowd

2 March 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Sounds a bit sh*t, but you never can tell with SRO’s marketing evil. Plus it has a good pedigree (‘from the makers of The IT Crowd,’ they say. Who’s that? The writers? The cameramen? The people who press the DVDs?)

ARCADIA

Arcadia is a youthful sitcom set in the real world around Clacton’s finest computer games shop Games 4 U with a cast of characters whose minds are somewhere else entirely…

The shop is in financial trouble and ever-so-slightly neurotic manager Tony (Edinburgh Fringe Award winner Nick Mohammed) is doing his best to keep things afloat, ably assisted by Mr Sci-Fi convention himself, Jeremy Stokes (Matt Green), and the attractive, though unobtainable, Bella.

Tony believes he can design games better than the ones he sells; the problem is all his ideas are rubbish. Jeremy has played and completed every computer game ever released while still managing to have a surprising amount of luck with the ladies. This is all the more remarkable considering Jeremy regularly arrives for work dressed as gaming characters no one else has heard of. Bella is the gorgeous level-headed young assistant and the apple of Tony’s eye but unfortunately she is more interested in the mysterious hacker Clint who masquerades as an asexual-cyber-terrorist but is in fact a nice middle-class boy who still lives at home with his mum.

If you would like to join us for a night of comedy for ONE NIGHT ONLY on Saturday 8th March at 7.00pm then apply now! The minimum age for audience members is 16 years.

You can apply online at www.sroaudiences.com. Filming’s at the BBC TV studios in White City.

GF Newman’s Law and Order at the BFI

29 February 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Just been looking through my BFI catalogue for April. There’s the usual dearth of decent TV stuff, but on April 12th, they’re showing four episodes of GF Newman’s classic Law and Order from 1978.

Not to be confused with the long-running US show from Dick Wolf, Law and Order was the first British drama series to take a serious look at our legal system, police brutality and corruption. Newman, of course, was the guy who turned up at the Z-Cars writers’ meeting, suggested that one of the detectives should take a bribe and was told that “maybe he was on the wrong show”.

The BFI is screening all four episodes of the show, each of which looked at a different aspect of the legal system (The Detective’s Tale, The Villain’s Tale, The Brief’s Tale, The Prisoner’s Tale), starting at 2pm, with an introduction by GF Newman himself.

But there’s also good news: the show’s about to be released on DVD, and there’s a follow-up series on the way. I hasten you all to watch it if you can. Good luck finding the DVD on Amazon when it’s released – it’s going to be somewhat swamped by the US shows, by the looks of it….