Ah, okay. I just remember him seeming as if he was on the cusp of stardom - so the fact that he's less famous than Bryan Brown always seemed odd. Still, as long as he's actually working. So what was the long running TV show he appeared in and is it worth watching?

Yeah, and the Coens are seen driving an oddly familiar looking Oldsmobile when Darkman's swinging around over that freeway.

And ain't nobody gonna mention the brace of director cameos (Landis, the Coens, that guy who directed Maniac Cop).

I to had a neon pink Who Is Darkman T-shirt. Ah, that plastic print felt like kevlar - a sort of literal armour for the scorn I received from, well, everyone. I'm pretty sure I may have been the only person in the British Isles to score one, my brother having brought one back from the colonies for me.

Oh yes, Rob Roy. The thinking person's Braveheart. I don't have that one but I remember the music being stirring but with a sense of melancholy depth.

Burwell has delivered some great soundtracks but the extent to which his work draws on folk sources for his melodies sometimes makes me doubt his abilities as a composer per se. The wonderful theme from Millers Crossing is an arrangement of an old Irish air called Limerick's Lamentation. His Raising Arizona stuff…

Prole Hole - I thought Pegg's accent was perfectly okay. Or at least as okay as is humanly possible. It's a very tough accent to pull off convincingly if you're not actually Caledonian. But yes, given that I was expecting something really horrific.

The original show is wonderful and, as noted, very definitely an influence on Partridge.

Agreed Janet - though perhaps Galloping Galaxies wasn't the high note he should have gone out on. And I think Britain lost something of its soul when the BBC's Evening News Programme stopped being preceded by five minute long cartoons.

No Janet, Nathan with his streetwise smarts and laconic cool is clearly more like Michael Kenneth Williams than Kenneth Williams. Besides, all of Evil Edna was a television set.

Brad Bird and The Spirit movie we almost had….
The tragedy here is that we could have had a genuinely faithful Spirit film back in the 80's courtesy of Brad Bird. I try not to get misty-eyed over talk over tantalising movie projects that never were but dagnabbit I'm sure this would have been extraordinary.

The non-sucky Max Payne movie we nearly had…..
Back when the video game was first optioned by Hollywood the trades reported that Shawn Ryan, creator of The Shield, was writing the screenplay. So given Ryan's previous track record and the fact that the game itself had an interesting tone I was initially looking…

Spinal Tap Echoes
I saw this the other night and there are Tap echoes in every other scene. Some I'm willing to believe are totally coincidental but there are one or two very deliberate nods (including a close up of an amp being cranked up to that number after 10) which made me briefly question the director's…

This pleases me. Kenny still has much to teach us.

I've still not seen Across 110th Street. Having been crushed by Shaft's failure to live up to its score I'm wary of watching it. Does it live up to that soundtrack?

Apparently James Brown didn't fully understand the instructions given to him for scoring Black Caesar and gave Larry Cohen a score twice as long as asked for, just so they'd definitely have enough music to go around….

Before in got shelved in the run up to the Iraq war George Miller was planning to make a fourth Mad Max film in the deserts of Namibia - as move which would have forever cemented the link between the Roadwarrior's universe and the real life dystopias of the Third World.

Nuke - I wasn't disputing that it's set in future, there's a caption right at the beginning telling us that the events are unfolding "a few years from now." But, with its sequels being better known, there's a widespread belief that the whole trilogy is genuinely post-apocalyptic. And dag-nabbit I'm a pedant.

Mad Max
Technically the first Mad Max film is simply horribly dystopian rather than apocalyptic. Yes, the civilisation it depicts seems to be teetering on the brink of collapse but it's still relatively intact . That's why there still seems to be something resembling a judiciary and the marauding gangs are wearing…

Dan - I've seen the complete run of Red Riding - it's very good. Not quite on a par with the novels but still, it's the anti-Heartbeat I've always yearned for. It's a cruel irony that's it's arriving on UK screens the day after ITV announced sweeping job cuts in Yorkshire….