Growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver in the 1970s was as white-bread, middle-of-the-road as it's possible to be. Somehow, though, my brother - two-and-a-half years younger than me - got into punk music when he was in his mid-teens, and since his bedroom was next to mine, and he didn't own a decent pair of…

Disappearing in a swimming pool would really be a story for the ages.

Holt's disappearance is indeed a great story; especially the fact that the first thing that was named after him in commemoration was a swimming pool.

Don't end up like Harold Holt. Losing a Prime Minister like that is just careless.

A lot of fans of the BBC's Ripper Street were up in arms when the show was cancelled after its second series late last year; despite glowing reviews, the gritty Victorian-set drama failed to win the ratings battle with I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here when the Beeb moved it to Monday nights from Sunday (where it…

Still looking pretty damned good, based on her outing in Lucan. And she's excellent in a very difficult role. It would've been easy to just portray her character as a doormat, but McCormack brings out the fierceness of a woman fighting not just for herself and her children, but against a system that thought it…

The disappearance of the S.S. Waratah in 1909 - no trace of the ship, or the 211 people on board her, has ever been found - is one of the great nautical mysteries of all time, and has spawned several theories as to what happened to her and where she is.

British TV recently aired a two-part dramatisation of the Lucan affair, called simply Lucan. Based on John Pearson's book The Gamblers, it stars Paul Freeman as Pearson, who in the course of researching his book (many years after Lucan disappeared) becomes fascinated with the character of "Lucky" Lucan (a superb Rory…

Melissa McBride for series MVP. I've thought that for a long time, but she was brilliant tonight. Her forced normalcy in the aftermath of Mika's death - the pained smile, the huge effort to make it look like everything was fine - was perfectly done, and then the dissolve into tears after Lizzie and Tyreese walk away -…

I think the first thing I saw her in was My Brilliant Career - like Judkins Ma., I saw a lot of those great Australian films when they premiered (thanks to Vancouver having a great arts cinema scene at the time) - and thought she was wonderful, and extraordinarily lovely. RIP, Wendy, you went too soon.

Am I the only person who saw the headline and wondered why anyone would remake the 1943 Olsen and Johnson movie Crazy House?

Thanks for mentioning this; was just coming here to post the same thing. I think I remember reading that they got a bit more money than they'd expected for the series, so could afford to do an extra episode, but it had to be a bottle one, so they came up with this, shot in two long takes as an homage to Rope (it looks…

I had no idea Phyllis Logan and Kevin McNally were married! What a great couple, right up there with Prunella Scales and Timothy West.

It's very atmospheric, and I can see why it inspired Matheson. Apparently it was considerably more extensive in the late 1960s/early 1970s, when sections first began to be preserved, but a lot of the old Underground City was lost as the area around Pioneer Square/Pike Place Market was redeveloped. The fellow who can…

And with the team silver medal, she becomes the first athlete from the province of Newfoundland and Labrador to win an Olympic medal. Canadian Olympic TV coverage: it's educational!

I think one of the reasons this series is so fondly remembered is because Darren McGavin is so brilliant as Kolchak. That world-weary cynicism could become tiring, but McGavin sells it every time, largely because he gets interested in every case almost despite himself. And his timing, phrasing, and wry delivery makes…

I love his hat. And if I had $560 to spare, I'd buy one:

Oh yeah, I caught that moment about Joubert too, and grinned, because that was exactly what I got from it: Kurt revealing Carol's schoolgirl crush, but affectionately.

An illustration of why the CBC skating commentary is so great: one ice dance team gets a 1.0 deduction for a lift lasting too long. Browning - a singles skater - asks of his co-commentators why this deduction happens so much in ice dance, when surely it should be a matter of lifting on this beat, setting down by this…

Something I like about whatever network is broadcasting the Olympics in Canada (CBC this year) is that everything is live, no matter what time that means across the country. So here it is, Sunday morning at 9.30am Pacific, and I'm watching the ice dance portion of the team skating event live, with intelligent…