In the UK: Christmas Day, 9.30pm, BBC2
I’ve raved on many occasions about the BBC’s Christmas Ghost Stories, most of which were written by MR James. There have been various attempts over the years, mostly by BBC4, to resurrect the idea. Now BBC2 is giving it another go – mostly at the instigation of Doctor Who and Sherlock writer (and mega MR James fanboy) Mark Gatiss.
And marvellously, it’s going out on Christmas Day. Here’s a gothic BBC2 trailer:
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.
So in the absence of much TV, I’ve been having a bit of a superhero movie fest. And it’s odd watching even something like Batman Begins, which feels like it only appeared yesterday but actually came out in 2005 – so nearly a decade ago. Even Captain America: The First Avenger was 2011 or nearly three years ago.
Whatever the time period, though, it seems the casting people on those superhero films knew what they were doing since if you look closely, you can spot lots of future stars in quite small roles. First up is Jack Gleeson, whom you may know a whole lot better as King Joffrey in Game of Thrones.
Yet in Batman Begins, he was that sweet little boy who Batman gives a present to and Rachel saves when all hell breaks out:
Captain America, on the other hand, was good at giving future famous actresses roles, albeit quite small ones. Natalie Dormer is these days better known from her roles in Game of Thrones (she’s in that clip above) but also as Irene Adler/Jamie Moriarty in Elementary.
But back in Captain America, she was the American soldier who had a thing for Steve Rogers and made Hayley Atwell jealous (sorry, can’t embed this one – no jokes).
Jenna (Louise) Coleman is best known as Clara Oswald in Doctor Who.
But she also went on a double date with Steve and Bucky to the Stark Expo in Captain America.
Have you any favourite “before they were famous” movies?
What would Christmas TV be without an animated Christmas special? Here’s one from Community…
The Daily News will return on Monday 6th January 2014. Happy holidays, news readers!
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