Sitting Tennant

Friday’s Sitting Tennant (week 10, 2012)

9 March 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Hebbie's Sitting Tennant

Shilohforever's Sitting Tennant

Sister Chastity's Sitting Tennant

How very dare you.

  1. Sister Chastity: 15
  2. Hebbie, Shilohforever: 5

Don’t forget Tuesday’s caption competition!

Sitting Board of Winners
January
Pictures: Hebbie, Sister Chastity
Captions: Rullsenberg, SK

February
Pictures: Sister Chastity
Captions: Rullsenberg

Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below or email me and if it’s judged suitable and doesn’t obviously infringe copyright, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery. Don’t forget to include your name in the filename so I don’t get mixed up about who sent it to me.

The best pic in the stash each week will appear on Tuesday and get ten points; the runners up will appear on Friday (one per person who sends one in) and get five points.

You can also enter the witty and amusing captions league table by commenting on Tuesday’s Sitting Tennant photo, the best caption getting 10 points, everyone who contributes getting five points.

Each month, I’ll name the best picture provider and best captioneer, and then at the end of the year, the overall champion will be announced for 2012!

Friday’s “Jeremy Piven for Mr Selfridge?, Julie Benz joins Defiance, Lennie James in Gotham and Kevin Bishop’s Super Fun Night” news

9 March 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Film

UK TV

  • Channel 4 to launch highlights channel 4seven
  • Sky to cut BBC transmission charges
  • HBO, Starz, Showtime and ABC petition for UK tax breaks [subscription required]
  • Watch acquires Primeval spin-off [subscription required]
  • Entourage‘s Jeremy Piven to star in ITV’s Mr Selfridge?

US TV

US TV pilots

Classic TV

Lost Gems: Lynda La Plante’s Civvies (1992)

8 March 2012 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Civvies

What better way to celebrate International Women’s Day on a UK TV blog than to look at a piece of work by the UK’s most celebrated, famous and popular female TV writer, Lynda La Plante CBE? Even better, it gives us a chance to take a look at the show that gave the world its first proper chance to say “Hello to Jason Isaacs!”

Civvies was a 1992 BBC1 drama by former actress La Plante, who was fresh from BAFTA wins thanks to the previous year’s Prime Suspect on ITV. She’d written Civvies four years previously, but in common with a series she’d researched about the drugs squad, it had sat on the shelf until the Prime Suspect win had shown she was capable of more than just another rehash of her popular 1984 show Widows and its sequel Widows 2.

The show was inspired by a builder working on her house who asked her to help him find jobs for some friends who had just left the paratroop regiment. “I rang up eight different security firms, but they refused to offer work to ex-soldiers on the grounds that they were too institutionalised,” she said at the time in an interview with The Independent.

Deciding to tell the stories of these supposedly unemployable paras and men like them – in fictionalised form at least – La Plante created a show that saw a group of former paratroopers, traumatised and in one case seriously wounded by their tours in Northern Ireland, trying to find legitimate work for themselves on ‘civvy-street’ and instead inexorably being drawn into a life of crime.

For the show, which an executive at the time described as “the most violent home-produced series the BBC has ever made”, the producers assembled a cast including Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia himself), Peter Howitt (Bread and later the writer/director of Sliding Doors) and the relatively new-to-TV Lenny James (now best known from US shows Jericho, The Prisoner and Hung). James also went on to star in the BBC’s The State Within, where he was reunited with another Civvies co-star – a certain Jason Isaacs.

Here’s the opening title sequence.

Continue reading “Lost Gems: Lynda La Plante’s Civvies (1992)”