Of course, Canadian New Year was November 17th.

This was the year I finally got round to two TV series that I'd heard great things about but somehow missed: Slings and Arrows and Deadwood. Bloody hell, they were brilliant. Usually I watch something like that and think 'Okay, I've seen it now, no need to watch it again,' but for both I was wondering how long I…

You'll probably enjoy this Holmes parody, from a Russian TV show, which features actors playing Holmes and Watson as Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin. There are (not great) English subtitles, but it's still hilarious (some of the sight gags are inspired). http://www.youtube.com/watc…

My favourite Bob Clark film is Murder By Decree, which is one of the best Sherlock Holmes films ever made (James Mason stakes a claim as one of the finest Watsons ever). But for sheer WTF-ness it's hard to beat Clark's Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. The first half is pretty hard to sit through, but if you…

'A crummy commercial!' also gets a lot of air time in our house.

Great timing; A Christmas Carol was first published
on this date (19 December) in 1843. It's looking pretty good for a
170-year-old.

As one who recalls watching the Third and Fourth Doctors on PBS in the mid-1970s, I feel positively ancient.

This seems like the place to give a shout-out to John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together. I haven't seen the actual show since it originally aired in 1979, but the soundtrack is one of my favourite Christmas albums (once the household embargo on Christmas music is lifted on 1 December, it'll be one of the…

Oh yes, that was wonderful!

Love Marius Goring's little meta-commentary, when he finds himself on Earth among the rhododendrons and says direct to camera 'One is starved for Technicolor up there.' And the opening few minutes should be shown to aspiring filmmakers as a masterclass in how to introduce two characters quickly and economically,…

The trouble is that real life doesn't usually contain neat character/story arcs, so if you're dramatizing something about real people and events you either have to go the 'Eh, artistic licence' route to keep things neat (and play fast and loose with the facts, thus frustrating people who know the truth and/or want it…

I've upvoted this twice, because it's so true.

This was so much everything I wanted it to be, and then some. Yes, I wish Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire - for example - hadn't been given such short shrift, but at least they were there. And everything else was note-perfect, especially David Bradley, who is having a career year, what with this, Game of Thrones, Broa…

Also Mark Eden - who played Marco Polo in the Hartnell series - played the BBC higher-up who tells Newman to 'Kill Doctor Who.' And Jean Marsh can be seen in the front row of people standing at Verity Lambert's farewell party (Marsh played Sara Kingdom in 'The Daleks' Master Plan'). Call it self-indulgent, call it fan…

Oh yes, it got very dusty in our living-room there at the end. And David Bradley is outstanding as Hartnell. One scene in particular, towards the end, when he's standing in front of the fireplace and his wife leaves to make a cuppa - if you don't choke up a bit, then check for a pulse.

I used to work at the front desk of a big hotel near the airport in Vancouver, and got really fed up by all the Americans who'd change some money, look at the Canadian bills they'd been given, and make a crack about 'Monopoly money' or 'funny money'. Hang on a sec, while I try to fake a good-natured grin to disguise…

Yeah, it's kind of weird to read all the people saying they first saw this show on 'Nick at Nite' when they were kids. I first saw it when it originally aired, when I was a kid, and I don't think of it as all that long ago; but it's four decades now, and I suddenly feel really old (not as old as when my son, then…

Liked for the reference to Sheridan Le Fanu. Forget Poe (who didn't write ghost stories) - Le Fanu is the granddaddy of the modern ghost story, the first person to start moving it away from the Victorian model (good triumphs, bad people get what's coming to them) to the more modern idea that sometimes bad things…

They didn't actually send him to the Colonies, so I guess it was a reward (the awarding of the position came after the novel ). Fun fact: I live an hour north of the 'blink and you'll miss it' town of Lytton - at the junction of two of the mighty rivers of British Columbia - which was named after the Colonial…

Anyone into the finer points of raising/looking after pigs will be pretty well-served by series four. The most inadvertently funny line was when one character remarked casually to another 'I understand you've given up pigs.' Unfortunately, we never learned whether this was merely for Lent, or the result of a…