Before Penny Dreadful I didn't really know too much about Josh Hartnett, and kind of dismissed him as a pretty-boy actor who was okay, I guess. He's certainly been a revelation in PD, more than able to hold his own against Eva Green and Timothy Dalton (who are certainly no slouches here in the acting department), and…

Merci beaucoup.

Agreed. Any student who watches the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights instead of reading the novel is going to be very surprised come exam time. "Linton? Hareton? Cathy Jr.? WTF??"

For someone so associated with horror and the supernatural, it's only fitting that when Lee was at Eton the provost was M. R. James, the greatest writer of ghost stories who ever lived (and no, that's not hyperbole).

As of 2005, at 81, he was still brilliant as Fagin. https://www.youtube.com/wat…

Breaking news on The Guardian site that Christopher Lee has died. What a really shitty piece of news to wake up to.

The whole scene when the T Rex first appears is so beautifully shot, paced, and judged that I could watch it on a loop and not get tired (well, not for a while). From the moment we see the dangling rope the goat was tied to, to the claw coming over the fence (and how perfect is that in so many menacing ways: not just…

I met Bob Peck once; he was starring in Edward Bond's Lear at the Barbican in London in 1983. I'd seen him not long before in the filmed version of the RSC's epic nine-hour production of Nicholas Nickleby, and thought he was superb as the decent Yorkshireman John Browdie and the villainous Sir Mulberry Hawk. I asked…

They're doing some filming near where I live (a tiny town in British Columbia in semi-arid desert country west of Kamloops). I can see the location from my front deck, across the river on the Ashcroft Indian Band reserve. No word on whether Duchovny and/or Anderson will be here.

I lived in England from 1992 - 1997, so much as I'm enjoying 1995 week here, there's a lot of North American news and pop culture I sort of missed out on, as it didn't cross the pond. Some of it I'm sorry about; but I'm not at all sorry that I missed out on the OJ circus. It got reported on in the British papers, and…

Brought back memories of the short-fingered vulgarian. Spy really had Trump figured out, years before most people had ever heard of him (luckily for them).

Weekly Ferdinand Lyle soundbite:

The hair is certainly wonderful; but that beard! Anyone can manage an elaborate hairdo, but it takes a special kind of dedication to dye, style, and maintain a beard like that.

It was almost like watching an episode of Spartacus for a moment. And in some ways I think Spartacus was better written and had more characters - good, bad, and somewhere in between - for the audience to care about. No death in GoT has affected me the way

The sparring between Ethan and Insp. Rusk was really well done; both men playing their cards close to their chest, all surface bonhomie (Rusk) and cheeriness (Ethan) but all sorts of stuff swirling around underneath. Delightfully written and acted.

There's been some seriously creepy and disturbing stuff on this show (no, that's not a complaint), but that final scene with Sir Malcolm's wife was seriously creepy and disturbing, especially when her two dead children crawled their way out of their graves and stood there silently as if accusing her. It reminded me of…

'It proceeds with a stately flow; no Dickensian flamboyance or Thackerian japeries.'

Ah, there were giants in those days.

Yes, Bronn (Jerome Flynn) is one of the stars. There've been three series: the first two from the BBC, the third from Amazon (to air on the BBC and BBC America, although Amazon has already broadcast them). Amazon has confirmed two more series, which is great news.

It's kind of odd, to me - who loves the milieu of Victorian London - that there's no end of loving depictions of imagined SF other worlds to be seen on screen; but when it come to something that existed just over a hundred years ago, we get a kind of anodyne view of it: gorgeous costumes, but no life. Penny Dreadful…