Today’s Joanna Page: The Real Hustle

13 October 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In a little bit of a break with tradition, Today’s Joanna Page is a preview of a show she’s appearing in as herself: The Real Hustle. It’s a show where various confidence trickster types try to dupe members of the public – and, for this series, celebrities – with various tricks.

In this trick, there’s an eating challenge, which to be honest, is a bit sh*t and it was pretty obvious what they were doing. But you do get to see

a) Joanna Page
b) the interior of the Trafalgar Studios, as well as the sets of Fat Pig, before it relocated to the Comedy Theatre

The episode will be airing on Thursday 16th October at 10.30pm on BBC3.

Monday’s seven doctors news

13 October 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Doctor Who

Film

Radio

British TV

  • Richard and Judy ratings getting even lower
  • FX to show John From Cincinnati in November

US TV

Sitting Tennant

Today’s Sitting Tennants (from Jane and Scott): Love’s Labours Lost

10 October 2008 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

David Tennant in Loves Labours Lost

© Rex

images

Just as I was beginning to wonder if you’d all gone off David Tennant, suddenly everyone started submitting pictures to the gallery! Both Scott and Jane Henry, within the space of a couple of hours, have decided to delight you all over the weekend with pictures of DT in Love’s Labours Lost. Apparently, he does a lot of sitting around in it. Both Jane and Scott get the usual one and a half points each for current photos – well done guys. Keep up the good work.

The current Sitting Tennant league tables are as follows. For pictures, Rosby’s still on six entries and Persephone’s on four. But Poly and Scott both now have three and a half points each, Toby has three, Anna and new entrant Jane have one and a half, while Marie and Rullsenberg are at the back with one each.

The Witty And Amusing Captions league table has changed a little, too. Toby is nearly unassailable with 11 captions, while Marie and Persephone are both on seven, Rullsenberg and Electric Dragon both have four captions and Poly, Stu_N and Rev are on one each. Feel free to leave captions below for this entry, too, and keep those eyes peeled for any new pictures of David Tennant sitting down that you can find. Bonus points for Love’s Labour’s Lost pictures if you can find them.

Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below and if it’s judged suitable, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery. You can also enter the witting and amusing captions league table by commenting on existing photos in the gallery.

US TV

Review: Life on Mars (US) 1×1

10 October 2008 Rob Buckley 23 Comments

Life on Mars (US)

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: I’m guessing the Beeb will buy it. What do you think?

This is the one we in Britain have all been waiting for. Despite running for only two series, time travel cop drama Life on Mars became something akin to the crown jewels – a national treasure to be revered by everyone. Even the awfulness of spin-off Ashes to Ashes couldn’t dull our love for it.

So when we heard that the US was going to adapt it, we all feared the worst and assumed terrible things were going to happen to our precious*. “Take your hands off our crown jewels, Yanks,” was the general reaction.

To be fair, once we saw the trailer and the pilot, we actually had a good reason to be dismayed. The trailer was truly awful and the pilot was bland. Relocated from Manchester to LA, the show ditched most of the characters, took away a lot of the fun bits without adding anything, and didn’t really have any style of its own.

And ABC agreed. It took one look and said, “Guys, do you want to try again? Because this is sh*t.” So the producers did try again. They changed production team, relocated the show to New York, brought back all the old characters and rewrote the script. Then they brought in heavyweight acting talent Harvey Keitel, Gretchen Mol and Michael Imperioli – and reshot the entire thing.

Wow. They say pilots can be unrepresentative of the series that follow, but that’s all pretty unprecedented – although unsurprising given just how few new dramas ABC is running with this Fall.

Has that been enough though?

Continue reading “Review: Life on Mars (US) 1×1”