Commissioning Editors:
Mark Clapham
Jon de Burgh Miller
Eddie Robson
Jim Smith
Site Design & Programming:
Jon de Burgh Miller

‘Revelation of the Daleks’ is, to quote a famous description of ‘The Was The Week That Was’ a ‘low, sexy thing’.

‘The Green Death’ is one of those ‘Doctor Who’ serials that all pub bores and stand up comedians of a certain age will recall at a moment’s notice. It is, in ‘Friends’ parlance, ‘The One With The Giant Maggots’.

“In sixteen hundred and sixty six London burned like rotten sticks…”

This is neither the best Doctor Who TV story, nor the best Doctor Who DVD package of recent months, but there’s much to enjoy here all the same.

1977’s ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ is one of the most memorable of all ‘Doctor Who’ serials. The six-episode screenplay, by the series most frequent and beloved writer, Robert Holmes, is an accomplished and darkly witty Sherlock Holmes pastiche.

‘The Seeds of Death’ hails from the second half of the 60s, from when ‘Doctor Who’ was genuinely the favourite TV show of the children of the British nation.

Unsurprisingly, this is a comic that gets it almost entirely right…

I was, I’ll admit it, really quite moved by the final page of ‘Infinite Crisis’ #1 the appearance of Kal-L, the Golden Age Superman, the first, best, character in super hero comics and the progenitor of the whole of this medium’s primary genre.

Casey Affleck plays Jim, a man slouching towards thirty who suddenly has to drag himself across America, from the glamour of his self-chosen home in New York back to his parents’ house in the Midwest.

The middle chunk of a multi-film epic is always going to have an easier ride than the segments either side of it, and ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ is no exception.

The most notable feature of the disc is the transfer which is one of the first live-action films to be sourced directly from the digital files, with no telecine or film prints involved whatsoever. This gives a clarity and crispness that, while greatly beneficial, only drives home that these films are really meant to be [...]

To call ‘City of Death’ the most overrated ‘Doctor Who’ story would be churlish and mean-spirited. It would also have a sizeable dollop of truth to it.

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‘Factotum’ doesn’t initially present the most enticing of prospects: an adaptation of the writings of American miserablist Charles Bukowski, starring Matt Dillon and directed by Bent Hamer…

A cynical man might look at Stephen Frears’ indifferent and largely jolly ‘Mrs Henderson presents’ and come to the conclusion that, having seen Mike Leigh gain clout and praise for a historical film about theatrical people, he decided to do the same.

In the 1960s Chairman Mao’s government encouraged, cajoled and ultimately ordered thousands of Chinese people to move form the cities into ‘expanding’ areas in order to create a new ‘front’ against both Western capitalist economies and that alternative ex

Hal Hartley once managed to portray the apocalypse with nary more than Polly Harvey and a Salvation Army band, so it shouldn’t really be much of a surprise to see him attempt micro budget dystopianism.

This awesomely titled pulpy detective flick comes courtesy of the pen and directorial vision of ‘Lethal Weapon’ scribe Shane Black – which makes it all the more odd that its closest point of reference is ‘Adaptation’.

The final episode of ‘Enterprise’ the intertextually entitled ‘These Are The Voyages…’ has come in for a lot of flack, odd given that the episode’s authors called it a ‘valentine’ to ‘Star Trek’ fans.

James Edward Smith was born in Solihull, attended Alcester Grammar School and University College London and lives in London, where he writes about trivial, cultural and media things for money. Sometimes people ask him how many books he’s written – and when he lists them he’s always shocked by how many there are.
Jim has [...]

That the Andrew Davies scripted BBC ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was over ten years now is a source of some small distress to me.

Much has been made of the ‘soap-style’ approach of this new version of ‘Bleak House’: twice-weekly, in half-hour episodes, with cliffhangers…

‘Transformers: Fallen Star’ is a miscellany; a collection of eight page, single and multi-part black and white comic strips written by Simon Furman for the Weekly UK Transformers comic.

‘Grand Luncheonette’ is an epitaph for Fred Hakim’s 42nd Street, New York City Hot Dog stand which closed forever in 1997.