The Doctor Who episode "Midnight" would have to rank pretty high on a list of "Best Bottle Episodes".

"He has NO idea how to be a father apart from not being HIS father?"
This harks back - heartbreakingly - to the scene two episodes ago when Bill started down the hallway toward his crying son, then stopped, obviously conflicted. Because on the one hand he's obviously thinking like his father - "Shut that kid up!" (and…

And this is what great TV can do; tell one story on the surface, but have so much else swirling around underneath and in the background, everything informing and expanding on everything else, adding layers and depth. It's shows, and episodes, like this that show up so much else on TV as the inane, superficial dross it…

We don't get Showtime here in Canada (although we do get a choice of HBO east or west), so I can watch Leftovers on HBO east at 7.00 pm Pacific. Masters of Sex - like most other Showtime shows - airs here on Movie Central, at 9.00 pm Pacific.

I'm still hanging in with The Leftovers, although at this point it's more idle curiosity as to where it's going (I haven't read the novel), plus a lack of anything else on at 7.00pm PDT that I want to watch. But I agree: how Leftovers is getting more viewers than Masters of Sex is a puzzler, since the latter is a much…

Yes, I was glad to see Carol Cleveland as well. I hope my legs look as good as hers when I'm 72. Heck, I wish they looked as good as hers now.

That's the march from The Dambusters at the beginning of the Banter skit.

Just want to give a shout-out to Neil Innes's 'When Does a Dream Begin' song, which is a spot-on pastiche of 1930s romantic songs that benefits from being written and sung absolutely straight. If you didn't know that Innes had written it specifically for the show, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was an obscure song…

We went and saw it in the cinema in Kamloops, BC (55 miles from where we live); there were about 60 people there, all of whom clearly knew their Python (I'd say half the audience was 30-ish or younger). The Lumberjack song got a huge cheer, probably because Kamloops sits on one of the mighty rivers of British Columbia…

Garner and Pleasence together in Great Escape are my favourite pairing in that film, and one of my favourite film pairings, full stop. There's no way those two should have any kind of rapport or friendship, but dammit, they were brilliant, establishing their characters and their relationship in a few deft strokes and…

Well, stout yeoman, four ounces of Caerphilly, if you please.

'Absolutely timeless, with range, personality and class. He will be missed.'

Me too! Debating whether or not to stop at the grocery store on the way and pick up some SPAM, a fish, and a box of wafer-thin mints to take with me (I doubt they'll have any albatross).

I think Queenie is supposed to be Henry VIII, hence the reference to her father being 'born again'.

Bean sounds more like he's making a pitch to be one of the show's writers. Which makes sense, because as far as surviving each season goes you've got much better odds as one of the show's writers than as one of the actors.

The RAF banter skit gets me every time. 'Cabbage crates coming over the briny!' I think I may have seen too many British WW II movies.

I love the throwaway bit in the 'Wife Swapping' skit where Palin, as the Grandstand host, gives us a late score: 'Coventry City nil, Mr. Johnson's Una 3; Coventry going down at home there.' It gets a modest laugh from the audience, but not as large a laugh as it deserves.

Gordon Burn's book about Fred and Rse West - Happy Like Murderers - is one of the most bleak and depressing things you'll ever read. 'The feel-good book of the year' it isn't. Slightly - very slightly - less depressing is the excellent TV movie Appropriate Adult, starring Emily Watson as the woman who was assigned to…

There was a recent British two-part TV series called Lucan that dramatises the whole affair but sticks close to the known facts of the case. It's based on the John Pearson non-fiction book The Gamblers, and the framing story has Paul Freeman as Pearson researching the book, becoming fascinated with Lucan, and trying…

I was actually babysitting the first time I saw an ad on TV for the film - the original version - and it included the 'The calls are coming from inside the house!' line. The kids had just gone to bed, and the parents weren't due home for three hours or so. It was a very long three hours, I'll tell you. Don't know what…