Friday’s lovely, lovely news

Doctor Who

  • Maybe Kylie after all…
  • Gareth McLean interviews Jessica ex-Stevenson [free registration required]
  • Plus Freema Agyeman – aka Sweet FA – is on Jonathan Ross tonight. Sorry on Jonathan Ross tonight.

Books

Film

Music

British TV

  • Noel Edmonds to host the badly re-titled Sky version of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
  • Kirsty Young‘s leaving Five News
  • Anyone who thought Xena: Warrior Princess was in any way about female empowerment, think again – or at least send Universal Playback a rude message. Mud-wrestling glamour models to launch a DVD?
  • What happened to some of the former contestants of The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den [free registration required]
  • Celebrity Big Brother was more racist than anyone suspected. Full transcript here. Which is handy because it’s clear some celebrities haven’t read it

Australian TV

  • It could be worse: the father of one of the contestants has died in the Australian version of Big Brother and no one’s told her

US TV

  • CBS’s Moonlight gets recast, while Prison Break looks for some more inmates
  • And The IT Crowd needs a new Jen while Heroes needs some more heroes
  • Footage from the new Babylon 5 DVDs

And a great big shout-out to The Stage’s TV Today blog which is now one year’s old. Happy Birthday guys!

US TV

Season finales: Prison Break, My Name is Earl, The Unit, Jericho

As you may recall, last year I cast my reviewing eyes over the end-of-season finales for various US shows. The tissue-thin rationale I gave was “A good finale to a TV series can keep you watching even the biggest rubbish imaginable. They can be exciting, tense and a whole load of other things.

“Stress, of course, is a major health hazard. Therefore, so that UK viewers can brace themselves to an appropriate degree, I’ll be giving near-spoiler free guides to just how tense and exciting each of the major US TV shows’ finales were, starting today. US TV shows don’t end all at once: they’re spread over a period of three weeks or so, so there’ll be another couple of updates to come after this over the next week or so.”

Guess what. I’m doing it again this year using pretty much the same reasoning as I did last year. So here goes: there’ll be more to come over the coming days and indeed weeks.

Continue reading “Season finales: Prison Break, My Name is Earl, The Unit, Jericho”

News

Friday’s last news of the week

David Tennant in Doctor Who

Doctor Who

Film

British TV

  • Martin Freeman from The Office gets his own Channel 4 show, written by Toby Whithouse, about a washed-up magician
  • Mark Gatiss’s The Vesuvius Club will be adapted by the Beeb, with potential adaptations of The Devil in Amber and its forthcoming sequel as well [free registration required]
  • The A-Team reunite to contact George Peppard on Most Haunted?

US TV

Thursday news

Doctor Who

Books

Film

  • Barbarella is back
  • Brendan Fraser is back for The Mummy 3, but Rachel Weisz isn’t
  • Iron Man‘s suit revealed
  • Get Smart will be how smart? At least the cone of silence is back

British TV

US TV

  • Lewis Black gets a court show parody to accompany The Daily Show and The Colbert Report
  • Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Owen Wilson’s failed superhero pilot hits YouTube. Sounds an awful lot like Northstar in premise, mind.
  • Universal is planning a Simpsons ride in Florida
  • Jay Mohr gets the chance to escape from Ghost Whisperer with his own pilot
  • Katee Sackhoff gets a time-travelling TV movie
  • David Beckham gets a Prison Break tattoo
  • The producers of 24 have sent the South Park team a suitcase nuke
News

Tuesday’s news

Radio Times covers

Doctor Who

Books/Comics

  • Neil Gaiman’s doing a book-signing at Forbidden Planet on Friday

Film

  • The original Transformers movie gets a re-release in London
  • Michael Biehn might have a part in James Cameron’s Avatar. QFS.

British TV

  • Philip Glenister from Life on Mars slags off British TV [free registration required]

US TV

  • Lots of BSG interviews. Looks like Caprica’s off, though
  • Piper Perabo is going to be House‘s love interest. Maybe.
  • More pilot casting, with The Thick of It getting a lead at last
  • The usual spoilers from Kristen this week, including a forthcoming Lost fatality, Prison Break fatalities, and a Heroes fatality