Joanna Page

Today's Joanna Page

Rob Brydon’s Identity Crisis

12 June 2008 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

It’s going to be a bit of a Joanna Page overload day, today – we might have to switch from "Today’s Joanna Page" to "Joanna Page day" in fact. In fact, it might even be "Joanna Page week", judging by some of the entries since the weekend. I’m not sure how it’s happened, but I suspect a bizarre cabal of Jonathan Miller, the controllers of BBC1, BBC2 and BBC3, Richard Curtis and my wife, all working together to sabotage my editorial calendar and promote blonde Welsh actresses (or one of them at least).

First, then, a little note to mention that Rob Brydon’s Identity Crisis is being repeated on BBC2 on Wednesday at 11.20pm. Originally shown on BBC4, it’s quite a nice little piece – and funny, as you’d expect from Rob Brydon.

In it, Brydon sets himself the challenge of getting to grips with his Welsh roots by touring Wales, talking with people about what it means to be Welsh, what the Welsh are like, the Welsh language, etc, before performing a stand-up act at the end based on what he discovers.

Along the way, he talks to the English (in particular AA Gill and James Corden) and various Welsh luminaries including Alfred Marks, Ruth Jones, Joanna Page (of course), Griff Rhys Jones, Max Boyce, Victor Spinetti, Nicky Wire from Manic Street Preachers, and Goldie Lookin’ Chain.

It’s quite interesting, not just because of the various opinions he encounters, but because of his personal journey. At the beginning of the documentary, he starts off quite pessimistic, not very involved with his Welsh roots and unsure if he’ll ever be able to get an hour’s material out of the trip. But by the end, he’s loving it all and feeling very patriotic and positive.

Probably the highlight of the documentary, apart from archive footage of Brydon trying to pronounce Welsh placenames while on a stint as a gameshow host, is the behind-the-scenes filming of Gavin & Stacey and James Corden, who delivers this interesting thought on the Welsh language.

If you’re just in it for Joanna Page, here’s her contribution, more or less. I won’t lie to you: there’s not much.

Today's Joanna Page

TV star casting in the West End: good or bad?

10 June 2008 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Today’s biggish news is that famed director and writer Jonathan Miller has decided to have a go at West End casting practices – and in particular the casting of David Tennant (and Jude Law) in Hamlet.

Apparently, he’s been trying to get his no-star version of Hamlet into the West End but can’t, even though he reckons the performances are bound to be better than either Tennant’s or Law’s.

So the question for you, my friends, is does he have a point? Or do West End producers have a point?

For my own part, I’m very easily swayed by some big film or TV names into turning up at a theatre when I otherwise wouldn’t: my most recent theatre attendances (off the top of my head) have included Fat Pig (Joanna Page, Robert Webb, Kris Marshall, Ella Smith), Art (bloke off Dalziel and Pascoe, Sean Hughes and Alistair McGowen if I recall correctly), A Few Good Men (with Rob Lowe and John Barrowman), The Master Builder (Patrick Stewart and Kelly Reilly), Patrick Stewart’s one-man version of A Christmas Carol, and Sexual Perversity in Chicago (Matthew Perry, Minnie Driver, Hank Azaria, Kelly Reilly).

That’s money in the pockets of theatres that they otherwise wouldn’t have had with less well-known casts. And the West End isn’t exactly cheap.

More to the point, are celebs possibly the best choices? Maybe they’re famous because they have talent. David Tennant isn’t exactly unknown in theatre.

In fact, is Miller just grumpy because he couldn’t get his own production off the ground? Why have a go at a version of Hamlet that hasn’t even started performing? 

Fat Pig is the most obvious piece of TV celeb casting at the moment, so why not pick on it? Is it because, way back in 2002, he cast the RADA-trained Joanna Page in his production of Camera Obscura at the Almeida (to generally excellent reviews), and so wouldn’t have had much of a leg to stand on?

What do you think? Are good actors being overlooked? Are they being overlooked in favour of better, more famous actors? Or is celeb casting a necessary evil in a competitive market?

News

Gavin and Stacey news titbits

9 June 2008 Rob Buckley 11 Comments

Gavin and Stacey cast

Just a few idle Gavin & Stacey news fragments I’ve picked up that don’t have links and don’t fit in the Daily News format.

First up, James Corden called in to the Chris Moyles breakfast show last week. They’ve become pals of late, you see. Moyles asked for a part in series three and rather than saying, “We’re not doing series three”, “We’ll only do series three if we have the right story” or the other usual responses, he said he’d talk to Ruth Jones about it and then had a big discussion about why Moyles would merit a cameo, given he’s only seen half an episode. The response was “Seven million listeners”. Not conclusive, but encouraging, no? Thanks to my lovely wife for that little nugget.

Secondly, Jo Page was on The Paul O’Grady Show last week and mentioned that she and Corden have a scene to themselves for the first time in the Christmas Special, although it’s still being written so she doesn’t know what happens in it. Interesting, if not exactly inordinately big news, I know.

Speaking of JP, she’s running a 5k to raise money for Cancer Research UK as part of the Race For Life on June 22nd. Why not go off and sponsor her? She, and various other celebs, explain all about it over on the ITV web site – she doesn’t manage to persuade Fern Britten to join in though.

Today's Joanna Page

Today’s Joanna Page: To The Ends of the Earth

5 June 2008 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

First, a couple of public service announcements. You can listen to Joanna Page and Kris Marshall on Tuesday’s Daily Mayo (34 minutes, 16MB) talking about Fat Pig, and it turns out that absolutely everything I said about their interpretations of the play was right. I’m a theatre genius. You should listen to it purely for that reason alone, but it’s also possibly the only time you’ll hear either actor being asked to work out the volume of a hemisphere of radius 10cm. That might float your boat, too.

Our Joanna is also going to be on The Paul O’Grady Show this Friday (5pm C4, 6pm C4+1), discussing Fat Pig again – yes, I belong to a gym that has The Paul O’Grady Show (and Robyn and The Ting Tings) playing 24/7 on its TV screens: why do you ask?

Now, on with Today’s Joanna Page, which is To The Ends of The Earth. As you might have gathered by now, I do loves a nice bit of naval fiction, particularly if it’s set in the 19th century.

Not all period naval fiction is the same, though. CS Forester’s series of books featuring Horatio Hornblower, personified on TV screens most recently by another Welsh god, Ioan Gruffudd, is about ambition, moral values, doing the right thing and the little details of life in the Royal Navy.

The Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian, on which the movie Master and Commander was based, are about many things including the mechanics of sailing, politics and the state of science and medicine during the times of the Napoleonic Wars. But principally they’re about the etiquette and social life on board ships and within the Navy. You’re stuck on board a ship of war for anything up to a year with a bunch of men who were probably pressed into service, rather than having volunteered, and you have very little to do: how do you keep charge? How do you while away your time?

William Golding’s “To The Ends of the Earth” is a trilogy of books that follows young aristo Edmund Talbot as he makes his way down to Australia to become a politician. As you might expect from the author of Lord of the Flies, it’s almost the flipside of the Aubrey-Maturin series: Aubrey, Maturin and the crews of the various ships Aubrey commands in the series are all jolly good chaps and fine company, with only a couple of exceptions; “To The Ends of the Earth” asks the more unpleasant question: what if you’re stuck on board a ship populated by complete bastards and you’re not too well laden with social skills yourself? What do you do then?

Book 1, the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage, concerns the downfall of one of Talbot’s fellow passengers, the Reverend Colley and is something of a mystery story – what happened to the Reverend that brought him so low? Close Quarters follows on and concerns an obviously ill Talbot and his instant love for Marion Chumley, a passenger on another ship they encounter. The third book, Fire Down Below, concludes the voyage of the increasingly unreliable HMS Pandora.

In 2005, “To The Ends of the Earth” was turned into a series of three TV movies for BBC2. Guess who they got to play Marion.
Continue reading “Today’s Joanna Page: To The Ends of the Earth”

Thursday’s multiple personality news

5 June 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Film

British TV

  • S4C invests in TV-on-a-PC scheme for students
  • Sky One to show ABC Roman mini-series Empire
  • Sheridan Smith to be Jonathan Creek‘s Christmas assistant
  • Next series of The Real Hustle to scam celebs including Matt Dawson and Joanna Page
  • Developing a Tomorrow’s World replacement top priority for Beeb

US TV

  • Showtime orders 12 episodes of Toni Collette’s and John Corbett’s The United States of Tara
  • Gary Cole and Jeffrey Tambor up for Good Behavior