Joanna Page

Today's Joanna Page

Random Acts: Amber Heard melts Twitter, Serene Branson has a complex migraine, Joanna Page designs a Welsh bra

21 February 2011 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Amber Heard on Top Gear

So yesterday was of course the day when thanks to Top Gear, British men en masse discovered there exists a woman called Amber Heard and that not knowing this fact had substantially impoverished their lives. Now our Amber didn’t come ex nihilo and had British men decided to watch Hidden Palms all of five years ago (despite – oh dear – my recommendations), they’d have known all about her. Here are a couple of her finest moments – she/Greta being easily the best thing in it – from the otherwise not that great pilot.

But they didn’t so have lived in terrible ignorance for five years. You could tell this because at 11am yesterday, a Twitter search for Amber Heard would have got you about one Tweet an hour of something like “Amber Heard is the SITRPC on Top Gear? Who’s she? I thought they were getting someone exciting.”

By about 8.35pm, Amber Heard had become the number one Google image search and first a UK then a global Twitter trending topic. And let’s just say The Informers was starting to get an awful lot of illegal downloads. If you thought Top Gear‘s ratings were sagging and it’s been losing its influence this series, turns out you were wrong.

Here’s the interview in case you missed it and want to know why British men went Amber-mad yesterday. Forgive Jeremy Clarkson – he’s Jeremy Clarkson.

Moving on, another of last week’s Random Acts participants, Serene Branson, who we all thought had a stroke live on air, fortunately only turned out to have a complex migraine.

And since this is TMINE, let’s let Joanna Page get in on the randomness this week by designing a Welsh bra. It’s for charity.

Joanna Page's bra

UK TV

Review: Bedlam 1×1

11 February 2011 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Bedlam

In the UK: Sundays, 9pm, Sky Living
In the US: Saturdays, BBC America. Some time in 2011

Think of Sky Living (formerly Living TV) and what comes to mind? Largely reality TV shows like Britain’s Next Top Model and daft psychic and ghost-hunting programmes like Most Haunted. So Bedlam is something of a departure for the channel: its first scripted drama.

Not much of a departure though, because this is essentially Most Haunted: The Even More Obviously Fictional Version. Featuring a host of young, pretty actors – and Will Young (yes, the winner of Pop Idol) – Bedlam is set in ‘Bedlam Heights’, a former mental asylum in which the patients were abused, murdered, etc, and which has now been turned into a block of luxury apartments by Hugo Speer (The Full Monty).

Can you see what’s going to go wrong here?

Speer’s daughter Kate (Charlotte Salt) lives in one of the flats with her pals Molly (Ashley Madekwe) and Ryan (Young). All seems to be going well until they find an old ring (no clues there) and Kate’s cousin Jed (Theo James) turns up. See, the thing is, former mental patient Jed can see dead people and it turns out there’s a lot of them at Bedlam Heights…

Cue the artistic, creepy trailer.

Continue reading “Review: Bedlam 1×1”

Today's Joanna Page

Today’s Joanna Page: Private Lives

3 February 2011 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Kimberley Walsh, Tess Daly and Joanna Page

Just in case you’re wondering what our Joanna has been up to of late, as well as appearing in Sky Living’s forthcoming (fictional) haunted house show, Bedlam, which weirdly stars Will Young and less weirdly starts on Sunday, she’s up in Manchester rehearsing for Private Lives with Imogen Stubbs. Here she is at the launch of the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting with Imogen, talking about both the prize and the play, but she’s in the Lounge chatting about it tonight, if you’re in town tonight.


She’s also going to be doing “loop-the-loops and barrel rolls in a stomach-churning aerobatic flight” for Comic Relief. So don’t forget to tune in for that.

Today’s Joanna Page: Dick Whittington in Milton Keynes

21 December 2010 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Joanna Page in panto

This is what Joanna Page is up to right now. Panto with Stavros Flatley. In Milton Keynes. What the hell did she do wrong? Still, her episode of Marple is coming up over the Christmas break and she’s on Shooting Stars as well, so at least if you want to see her in something over Christmas, you won’t have to go to Milton Keynes.

PS It sounds worse than it is – the panto is Dick Whittington and she’s starring with Dirk Benedict (Face from the original The A-Team). Don’t know why they’ve Photoshopped her to look more like Anthea Turner in the poster though.

Joanna Page and Dirk Benedict in panto

UK TV

First Dirk Gently picture released

12 November 2010 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

It started off as a couple of Doctor Who scripts written by Douglas Adams (City of Death, Shada). Then it got heavily altered and became a book (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency) that got adapted into a radio series.

Now it’s a one-off BBC4 special starring Stephen Mangan, Helen Baxendale and Darren Boyd (don’t forget to listen to him in the third series of Safety Catch co-starring Joanna Page on Radio 4 at 11.30am today) – and here’s the first picture from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Agency (see how it’s now promoted to bold?). I’ll say one thing: they’ve got the hair right.