The Elgin Marbles, they’re incomplete so not really worth anything…
Advance apologies to anyone attracted by the headline and expecting a serious, weighty piece on the Elgin marbles, preservation of historic art or the repatriation of disputed works.
One of my guilty TV pleasure’s is ITV’s Dickinson’s Real Deal, a sort of Antiques Roadshow meets Cash in the Attic where members of the pubic queue up to sell their family heirlooms for a few quid to dealers or, in the case of the wary and greedy, in a local auction.
Uncharitable people would describe a lot of the items on the show as tat but as much of it has been passed down the generations I find myself shouting in the direction of the TV at people’s willingness to sell off items their parents and grandparents have obviously enjoyed and cared for.
Some of the dealers remind me of the spiv in Dad’s Army, taking the pursuit of a good deal to new depths. Viewers have the benefit of being able to see an onscreen independent valuation of the item up for grabs, and it’s not unusual to see a dealer offering a few twenties for something valued in the hundreds.
Acting as the honest broker, Dickinson will step in and stop the seller agreeing to a bad deal, and more than once he’s taken the dealer aside after they’ve struck a deal and insisted they hand over a bit more cash.
But what really makes me hurl the cushions at the screen is the spectacle of people told their attractive, 100 year old item isn’t worth much because of some microscopic scratch which is hardly noticeable even with the benefit of a TV camera on high zoom.
Which takes us back to the headline, I suspect that if the curator of the British Museum took the marbles on the show, some wide boy dealer would claim there’s too much damage for them to worth much but, because the seller is a nice chap he’s prepared to offer £20.
If you’ve not yet caught up with Dickinson’s latest TV exploits set your video for ITV1 weekdays at 4pm. If, on the other hand, you still want some information on the marbles, visit britishmuseum.org
Wild at Heart returns for 5th series
ITV has confirmed that Wild at Heart, which stars Stephen Tompkinson as a vet working in South Africa, is to return for a fifth series.
The series, on which Tompkinson also serves as co-executive producer, has been recommissioned for a further ten episodes after this year’s series averaged nearly eight million viewers.
Back among the lions, giraffes and elephants, love is continuing to blossom for Danny Trevanion (Tompkinson) and fellow vet Alice Collins (Steele – Sea of Souls, Monarch of the Glen) but will Danny have the courage to commit to her? Throughout the series the pair will face many challenges, not least the pressure of working together, and Alice must make some difficult decisions about her future at Leopard’s Den.
After a turbulent courtship, everyone’s favourite gruff Afrikaner, Anders Du Plessis (Deon Stewardson), is set to marry his beloved Caroline (Hayley Mills). Wedding plans are finalised but could someone from Caroline’s past threaten their happiness?
Alice’s estranged brother Rowan (Cal Macaninch – Holby Blue, Sorted), has installed himself at Mara making the rivalry between the two reserves more intense than ever. Alice is desperate to repair the relationship with her brother, but how far can Rowan be trusted? Is his attraction to business partner, Vanessa (Mary-Anne Barlow), genuine or does he simply want to get his hands on Mara?
Filming is set to start in July.
Identity - ITV announces new six-part crime drama
Aidan Gillen and Keeley Hawes play police officers heading up an elite unit formed to combat the explosion of identity-related crime in Identity, a new six part ITV drama currently filming in London.
Lead by unit founder DSI Martha Lawrence, (Keeley Hawes - Ashes to Ashes, Mutual Friends), the team works on cases where making an identification is a significant part of solving the crime by outsmarting, hunting down and unmasking the modern day Jekyll and Hydes.
Gillen plays DI Michael Bloom, a former undercover cop who know’s how easy it is to lose your own identity when you’re living a lie.
Holly Aird (Torn, Waking the Dead) is Tessa Stein, IT expert in everything from trawling databases to cracking security codes. Completing the team are DS Anthony Wareing (Shaun Parkes - Moses Jones, Harley Street), who has his eye on promotion and a stance on cases that can err on the self-righteous, and DC Jose Rodriguez (Elyes Gabel – Waterloo Road, Deadset) cocky, self-assured yet with a seriousness and sensitivity that gives him insight into cases. As the series unfolds, DS Wareing becomes more and more concerned about Bloom’s methods and frustrated by what he sees as Martha’s blind and foolish indulgence of him.
Kate Bartlett, Controller of Drama at ITV Studios, says: “This is a unique crime series, with an exciting cast, that explores the theme of identity. The psychology behind the issue of identity opens up a whole world of stories. We take for granted that people are who they say they are and a person’s ID is sacred. However, when that trust is violated it can provoke a special kind of fear, one that cuts to the heart of our sense of self and the world around us.”
Freeman stars in body-swap drama
Martin Freeman stars as Danny Reed who wakes up after an accident to find he’s a gorgeous woman in her early 30s in Boy Meets Girl, a new 4 part drama from ITV which airs next month.
Finishing work for the night, Reed heads off to the electricity power yard to steal some copper wiring to pay off his debts. It’s raining as he climbs out of his ‘borrowed’ van. A few yards nearby him in the lay-by Veronica Burton (Rachael Stirling) pulls up having run out of petrol.
When a flash of lightning strikes the pylon and there’s a huge explosion and Danny wakes up in hospital and is horrified to discover he’s no longer Danny Reed - he’s now a gorgeous woman in her early 30s.
Totally freaked out, he struggles to get his head around the fact that his own body has disappeared without trace, and he’s inside someone else’s.
Danny’s first impulse is to find out where the person he used to be has gone. But what dawns on him fairly quickly is that no-one knows and no-one is missing him apart from friends Pete (Marshall Lancaster) and Fiona (Angela Griffin). He seems to have simply disappeared, but that doesn’t stop him trying to find out where Danny went. In the meantime, Danny has to get his head round being stuck as Veronica – which means learning to be a woman, a fashion journalist, and living a totally different life with Veronica’s boyfriend Jay (Paterson Joseph).
As he begins to live Veronica’s life and meet her friends he starts to realise that she was having an affair with her best friend’s boyfriend and is less than enthused by her job as a fashion journalist. Meanwhile, Veronica is completely disorientated in her new male body and at a loss as to what to do, she’s forced to beg on the streets. At Veronica’s flat that night, as Jay makes it clear to a horrified Danny (Veronica) that he’s looking for romance, Danny spots his old self on the news in the middle of an angry demonstration.
ITV1, Friday, 1 May 2009, 9:00PM
Primeval back for a third series
There are some new faces when ITV’s hit adventure series Primeval returns later this month for a ten-part third series. Joining the team are maverick policeman Danny Quinn (Jason Flemyng), Egyptologist Sarah Page (Laila Rouass) and Captain Becker (Ben Mansfield), leader of the ARC’s security forces.
Still reeling from Stephen’s death and with the depth of Helen’s betrayal now revealed, Nick Cutter must fight to re-focus his embattled team in order to continue the work they started. But as the anomalies continue to present an unrelenting series of threats, the task in hand seems almost insurmountable.
Fans are promised “explosive action” as the team encounter creatures steeped in ancient folklore as well as the Giganotosaurus - a predator bigger and badder than a T-Rex.
Jonathan Pope is back and this time he’s working with zombies!
When Moving Wallpaper aired last year it was widely praised as one of television’s most intelligent shows in years, hardly surprising given it comes from Kudos, the production company responsible for Life On Mars, Spooks and Hustle.
Set in the fictional production office of Echo Beach, an equally fictional (but also real life!) soap, the show stars Ben Miller as Producer Jonathan Pope.
The upcoming second series picks up with Echo Beach having been axed and the fate of Pope and his creative team in the hands of Pope’s nemesis Nancy Weeks (Raquel Cassidy), who just happens to be Head of Continuing Drama at ITV1 .
Salvation appears in the shape of Renaissance, a one-off zombie thriller headed by former Ugly Betty star Alan Dale and Kelly Brook. “The idea behind the new series was to give Jonathan Pope (Ben Miller) a new challenge,” explains series creator Tony Jordan.
“After the demise of Echo Beach it was pretty clear that Jonathan’s position would be under threat. The idea was for him to try and pull the rabbit out of the bag by coming up with something extraordinary which turns out to be Renaissance.”
Reflecting on the sister show’s demise he comments: “I think it is part of the culture we know that things aren’t always given the time to just to find their feet. It was a bit of a shame. I always envisaged that Jonathan would move on and make other television shows but the demise of Echo Beach hastened that really.”
Jordan says he chose zombies because it was a “ground breaking, startling, concept for a new” although he confesses Channel 4’s Dead Set “put a slight spanner in the works!”
Returning to the show was “an absolute joy” for Jordan and Miller describes being back on set as “exactly like being back at the first day of school. Everyone immediately slipped back into the various roles they had before; bully, bullied, teacher!”
“The director’s probably the one who gets bullied at first, a bit like a supply teacher with the rest of us misbehaving! Of all the shows I’ve done it’s probably the one with the absolute best cast feeling. I don’t think that generally has any bearing on how good the show is, the two things just always seem to be completely unconnected. We really do all get on really well, it feels really relaxed and you feel as though you can try different things.”
Talking about Renaissance Miller comments: “We have Kelly Brook and Alan Dale in it and the costumes are amazing, it is so much fun.”
Jordan says the casting of Jason Donovan, Martine McCutcheon and Hugo Speer in Echo Beach “set the bar quite high” when it came to casting the actors for Renaissance and describes Brook and Dale as “dream casting really”.
Dale, known to millions as Neighbours’ Jim Robinson, says he agreed to do the show after watching the first series: “The producers sent me four episodes in LA and I laughed an enormous amount so when they made me the offer I said ‘Sure, I’d love to do it!’ I thought Ben Miller was just so funny as Jonathan Pope and I wanted to be involved in something that, In my view, was the same quality as The Office or Extras.”
One of the challenges facing Brook and Dale is playing what Brook calls “a heightened version” of themselves.
Brook says the fictional version of her “is very committed and dedicated to her work and is very similar to a method actress. She completely over analyses everything and is constantly questioning the writers’ motives.”
Picking up the theme, Dale says of his on-screen counterpart: “well he has the same name as me, is as good looking as me but I don’t know whether I would do or say the things he does. Despite that, it was great fun and it’s quite a challenge for me because I was trying to play myself and I kept thinking ‘how would I feel about this or that’ which is not what I’d normally do with a character.”
For Dale the blurring between character and actor wasn’t just confined to the worlds of Moving Wallpaper and Renaissance, as Brook explains: “People have been going around on set saying ‘Hi Jim, er I mean Alan’ - which is terribly embarrassing!”
Assuming he can make success of Renaissance, what does the future hold for Pope?
Miller says he’d “love to see Jonathan make a Sunday afternoon telly drama, Midsommer Murders-esque. Or let’s get Jonathan to produce an episode of Coronation Street!”
However, if Jordan gets his way Pope’s future is unlikely to be so ordinary: “If we did get re-commissioned for a third series I would absolutely love Jonathan Pope to make a musical. I think if he created a television musical it would be fantastic. I think would be hilarious and that’s what we’d do for the next series.”
ITV Friday, 27 February 2009, 9:00PM - 9:30PM
BUY MOVING WALLPAPER AND ECHO BEACH ON DVD
Moving Wallpaper returns in February
With Echo Beach now history, the production team from Moving Wallpaper are back to face a new challenge to come up with a hit show for ITV.
Egocentric producer Jonathan Pope’s frantic attempt to keep his job results in a new pilot which sees the writers switch from beach romance to zombie apocalypse. In an attempt to make the living dead ‘sexy’, the team have to bag the biggest stars and keep them happy, whilst covering Jonathan’s blazing trail of faux pas – as well as Nancy, the ITV Head of Drama, willing him to fail. Stunts, sex, cringes, and clashes with American execs follow as they attempt to create their zombie masterpiece: Renaissance.
After Echo Beach is canned Pope’s job is on the line and while he begs Nancy for another series, the welfare of his production team appear to be the last thing on his mind. However, as the team prepare to move on to new horizons a clause in Jonathan’s contract means ITV must now offer Jonathan a pilot to produce – much to Nancy’s annoyance.
Never one to soften, Nancy gives Jonathan a paltry minute to submit a treatment for a pilot or face the sack.
Ever the survivor and desperate for a great idea, Jonathan goes to extremes in order to find a great pilot and out of this Renaissance, an apocalyptic Zombie drama, is born. Nancy isn’t worried though; she is convinced that this abomination of film will never see the light of day as it’ll never pass the litmus test from the focus groups. Renaissance will never grace the home of Coronation Street and Ant and Dec.
Despite Nancy’s assurance Jonathan will fail catastrophically he manages to cast his leading lady almost instantly by poaching Kelly Brook from an ITV period drama that’s filming nearby.
ITV Friday, 27 February 2009, 9:00PM - 9:30PM
BUY MOVING WALLPAPER AND ECHO BEACH ON DVD
Corrie on your DS
Fans of ITV’s Coronation Street will soon be able to play the first ever Coronation Street game on their Nintendo DS handheld consoles.
ITV Global Entertainment Ltd has announced a deal with Mindscape and RTL Games to create a game which will see players take part in an “adventure and task based concept set within the theme of the famous fictional street.”
Aysha Kidwai, International Merchandise & Licensing Director, ITV Global Entertainment said: “Coronation Street is a national institution and was watched by over 78%* of the UK television population in 2008. We receive thousands of fan letters enquiring about the series every month. We’re responding to this huge demand by developing a range of exciting and innovative family targeted products inspired by the show”.