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This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our array of film and TV chats cover Monty Python, Sean Baker’s Anora and more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

As always, we have a wealth of fascinating topics and opinionated minds to offer on the Film Stories Podcast Network. Below you’ll find chatter about up-to-the-minute movies – including Oscar contender Anora – and classic TV, including Babylon 5.

Here’s what we have on offer this week:

Reel Talk

Sam Stokes is back for another discussion, with guest Bo Nicholson, discussing the film of the moment – Sean Baker’s Anora…

Britcom Goes to the Movies

Join the anarcho-syndicalist commune ran by Rob Heath and Guy Walker once again, with special guest in The League of Gentlemen co-creator Jeremy Dyson, chatting 1975’s legendary Monty Python and the Holy Grail…

The CineHistorians Podcast

Our newest podcast kid on the block...

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our array of film and TV chats cover top 10 Disney films, classic Doctor Who and more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

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Writers on Film

Lock your doors as John Bleasdale talks to writer James Rose about his Devil’s Advocate’s monograph on the terrifying Texas Chainsaw Massacre…

Vampire Videos

Hugh McStay and Dan Owen enter dark waters this week as they, alongside guest Dr. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, tackles Abel Ferrara’s seductive take on the vampire mythos, 1995’s The Addiction…

The Magic Box

It’s a charm offensive in Lost this week with 1×08 ‘Confidence Man’, as Kurt North sits down with guest Cortlan Waters Bartley to chat about the swaggering Sawyer…

Modern Horror

Turn that frown upside down and join Hugh McStay and A. J. Black, alongside guest Kat Hughes, to discuss Parker Finn’s Smile and the recently released,...

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our array of film and TV chats cover horror mega lists, comic pastiches and more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Modern Horror Podcast

Straying a little away from their usual patch, Hugh McStay and A. J. Black dissect Variety’s recent Top 100 Horror Movies of All Time list, but how many modern horror pictures make the cut?

You Have Been Watching

It’s getting creepy on our dedicated British sitcoms podcast as hosts Rob Turnbull and Alex Lynch tackle the cult curio that is Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible…

Make It So

Star Trek: Lower Decks continues its fifth and final season, with host Geoff Owen and guest Ashley Thomas discussing 5×03 ‘The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel’…

Britcom Goes to the Movies

Rod Heath and Guy Walker go to the transatlantic comedy well this week as they look back...

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our array of film and TV chat covers Terrifier, Joker and more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

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Modern Horror Podcast

Prepare to run away screaming in disgust as A. J. Black and Hugh McStay discuss the horror, the horror, of the Terrifier franchise, including brand new Terrifier 3…

Britcom Goes to the Movies

Rob Heath and Guy Walker idle about this week as they dig deep into Robert Young’s star-studded 1993 comedy, Splitting Heirs…

The X-Cast

A. J. Black presents the beginning of a multi-part series putting together all the Five Questions of X across the podcast from 2015, all about The X-Files, here including guests such as New York Times best-selling authors Greg Cox and Keith R. A. DeCandido…

Reel Talk

Sam Stokes returns with a new run of Reel Talk, a movie podcast exploring brand new releases, here joined...

“The Last Kingdom” and “My Policeman” star David Dawson leads an international cast in the dystopian thriller “The Flaw,” the feature directorial debut of Theophilos Papastylianos, which is currently filming in Athens.

Dawson is joined by U.K. actors Arthur McBain, Ralf Little (“The Royle Family,” “Death in Paradise”) and Danny John-Jules. Veteran Greek theater director Angela Brouskou also joins the cast in a lead role.

Set in a dystopian world dominated by the Regime, “The Flaw” follows a ruthless Interrogator (Dawson) who is ordered by the Special Service to follow a perfect Plan to prove a Suspect (McBain) is guilty. But once the interrogation gets underway, he comes to realize that there is a flaw not only in the Plan, but also in the Regime itself.

Published in 1965, “The Flaw” is the best-known work of Antonis Samarakis, one of the leading figures in modern Greek literature. It has been...

I hate you, Butler! But you’ll almost certainly love the selection of new things to listen to on the Film Stories Podcast Network. Here’s a menu:

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our shows have been busy bringing you an array of film and TV conversation.

Here’s what we’ve been up to…

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Britcom Goes to the Movies

Joining the network for its third season, Rob Heath and Guy Walker are joined by Smersh Pod funny man John Rain to discuss 1971’s big screen version of On The Buses. You’ll never see Reg Varney in the same way again…

The Magic Box

One of Lost's most iconic hours is on the agenda this week as Kurt North is joined by Darren Mooney to dissect 1×04 ‘Walkabout’. Just don’t tell them what they can’t talk about…

Modern Horror Podcast

Anthology horror series V/H/S...

There’s a wealth of things to listen to on the Film Stories Podcast Network, from critiques of Agatha All Along to dissections of The X-Files. Here’s what’s new this week:

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our shows have been busy bringing you an array of film and TV conversation. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Podcast-616

Marvel have kicked off a brand new series in Agatha All Along, and our all-purpose MCU podcast is bringing the party to you, as hosts Hugh McStay and Ashley Thomas discuss the first two episodes. Don’t miss Hugh with guest Rob Turnbull chatting episode three too…

ChuckyVision

Sadly, Chucky the TV show was cancelled this week but our dedicated coverage of all things killer dolls will endure, as hosts Mark Adams and Dev Elson here discuss The Garbage Pail Kids Movie from 1987…

The Magic Box...

A new bunch of shows land on the Film Stories Podcast Network – from Lost and vampires, to horror and Red Dwarf. More here.

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our shows have been busy bringing you an array of film and TV conversation. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

The Magic Box

Lost, that bonkers show we all watched relentlessly back in the day, is 20 years old this week so Kurt North fully kicks off coverage of the first season, looking at the ‘Pilot’ Part One with guest, A. J. Black…

Vampire Videos

Dan Owen and Hugh McStay continue their voyage through 100 years of vampire cinema by the 1997 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Night Flier, with guest Robert Clark…

One Rules Them All

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power continues apace and this week, host Luke Winch is joined by fantasy author...

Audiences have grown accustomed to dark visions of what could have been. Television alone has been bombarding the public with intriguing dramas that rewrite history, thus showing us the darker recesses of human behavior. Classics such as Sliders and Fringe or modern binge-worthy shows like Dark Matter and The Man in the High Castle make us thankful for our world and the choices we’ve made while horrifying us with glimpses into bleaker universes.

Even some of television’s most popular sitcoms have shown us what could have been, and while they might be trying to create laughs, they still have indirectly sent the odd shiver down the spines of viewers as well. Let’s take a look at some of the most hilarious, yet terrifying alternate realities in sitcoms.

Red Dwarf – “Parallel Universe”

Any fan of the immortal Red Dwarf will probably agree that, while it’s great that...

In the modern age of streaming and prestige TV, less is often considered more. A season of TV will be six, eight, or if you’re really lucky, 10 episodes long. It has been a bone of contention. During the recent writers’ strike, shorter seasons of streaming shows was one of the fields of conflict.

On the other hand, in a recent interview with CinemaBlend, Star Trek’s current head honcho Alex Kurtzman argued, “it’s funny you can talk to old writers of old Trek series, and they’re like, ‘Man, there’s a bunch of filler episodes in there. We are just trying to get to 22 a season,’ you know, and, and we all know which of those episodes were [filler], we know the ones that were truly stellar from the ones that felt like they were kind of spinning their wheels.”

A similar discussion has arisen as Lost has appeared on Netflix,...

Warning: spoilers for Doctor Who finale “Empire of Death”.

The mystery of Ruby Sunday has been solved, and after teasing the parentage of Millie Gibson’s motherless Mancunian since she arrived in Doctor Who’s 2023 Christmas special, series 14 finale “Empire of Death” brought everything full circle. Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteen had been helping Ruby try to trace her family tree all series, and now, we know who her mother is… a regular human woman with no supernatural or alien connections.

Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies has now confirmed that the big twist of Ruby’s mother being a young woman called Louise Alison Miller (played by The Responder‘s Faye McKeever) was directly inspired by one of Star Wars’ most divisive reveals.

As soon as we first saw baby Ruby being dropped off at the church on Ruby Road, there were swirling fan theories, with the wildest suggesting she...

After a gap of a few years and a messy-yet-secretive legal dispute between creators Doug Naylor and Rob Grant, Red Dwarf is rumoured to be back on its way to our screens once again with three new episodes. Which poses the question – how many more returns can it make before it finally draws to a close? How will the TV series that started with a pilot episode called “The End” end?

Red Dwarf is unlike any other science fiction franchise of comparable longevity. It is not like Stars Trek or Wars, an expansive universe full of side characters and unexplored domains for spin-offs to inhabit. Nor is it the adventure of a single character whose face changes on a semi-regular basis.

As part of the ongoing mysterious feud settlement, Rob Grant is launching Red Dwarf: Titan, which is set to give us a prequel/alternate universe take on Lister and Rimmer.

Red Dwarf is returning to television next year for three new episodes. Here are the details of what’s coming up.

According to British Comedy Guide, cult sci-fi comedy show Red Dwarf, which has been going for an incredible 36 years and counting, will return for three half-hour episodes. It’s said these will cover a single story. Filming is set to begin in October and it will be broadcast next year, although it is unclear exactly which channel it will be on. Charles, Barrie, John-Jules and Llewellyn will reprise their roles.

Writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor reconciled last year, releasing a statement that confirmed that while they had put their differences behind them, they would not be writing together. Each writer will work on separate iterations of the show, with Naylor continuing to write the television series, while Grant is writing a prequel series with 2point4Children writer Andrew Marshall.

Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" best handled the topic of choice.

Dark Matter Season 1 Episode 1 and Dark Matter Season 1 Episode 2 are the latest on this topic.

Duplicate characters existing in separate dimensions is hardly a novel concept on television (or almost any creative medium).

The first such episode featuring a parallel universe was, no shock, on the 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone, "The Parallel." An astronaut returns from a lengthy journey to find his world not quite the same as he remembers it.

Another early example came in 1970 on the soap opera Dark Shadows. Vampire Barnabas Collins found a room in his mansion, Collinwood, a portal he used to escape to parallel time.

This concept was most vital in the 1967 Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror." It was set in a dimension where evil twins of the Star Trek characters lived.

This mirror universe was revisited on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine...

The 90s has a not-entirely unearned reputation as a bit of a dead zone for television sci-fi outside of the USA – especially in the UK. However, the truth is that the 90s was actually something of a golden age. It’s just that in Britain, this golden age happened exclusively between 3:25 pm, when everyone got off school, and 5:30 pm, when everyone watched Neighbours. These homegrown and Australian shows ran the entire gamut of what science fiction could do, from hilarity to terror.

The budgets were low, the special effects had a short shelf life and most of them are now almost impossible to find outside of the memories of some nostalgic Millennials, but they introduced an entire generation to the sci-fi genre, as well as to some banging theme tunes.

Mike and Angelo (1989 -2000)

Mike and Angelo, a show whose title caused a generation to wonder why it...

The 1980s enjoys a privileged, some might even argue inflated position in the sci-fi pantheon. In the US, it was the decade that gave us two thirds of the original Star Wars trilogy, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Terminator and Tron. In TV land, Star Trek got a brand new Generation, Quantums Leapt, Knights Rode, and of course, Alf.

But on the other side of the pond, British science fiction television was doing things the way we British always have – for less money, and a bit more bleak. But it wasn’t all creepy John Wyndham adaptations and hostile alien invasions, the 1980s also delivered a couple of British space comedy classics, along with the most underrated series in sci-fi history.

The Day of the Triffids (1981)

Stream on: purchase-only on Sky Store, Google Play, Amazon (UK); disc import only (US)

For our money, still the only decent adaptation of John...

Star Trek is one of best and most well-known science fiction franchises of all time, so it’s no surprise that it’s had a huge influence on the rest of the genre. From other space-faring adventures to distant worlds to straight up parodies of the Enterprise and its crew, there are plenty of shows and movies that owe a bit to Gene Roddenberry‘s creation.

This is not a list of every single show or film that has been inspired by Star Trek because that list would cover a pretty good proportion of sci-fi on screen since 1966. But if you want to watch something Star Trek-adjacent, we’ve picked out 10 of our favorite shows and movies that were, to a greater or lesser degree, inspired by Star Trek.

Red Dwarf

Back in 1998, BBC 2 ran a Red Dwarf Night featuring interviews with celebrity fans, one of whom was Patrick Stewart.

Tony Robinson’s much loved 1990s Cbbc sitcom Maid Marian And Her Merry Men is heading to the stage this year, here are the details.

Though Tony Robinson is best known as dim-witted servant Baldrick alongside Rowan Atkinson across several iterations of Blackadder, to a certain generation he is creator, writer as well as playing the role of the Sherrif of Nottingham in Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. A classic show, which ran for four series on the BBC from 1989 to 1994.

For kids TV trivia fans, it is thanks to Maid Marian that Russell T Davies got his start in writing television drama.

Funding and studio time was booked for Maid Marian in 1991, but it was put on hiatus. Davies submitted his script for children’s sci-fi serial Dark Season to both the Head of Cbbc and to Granada. Both were interested, but Cbbc’s offer was better, Maid...

2024 really is the year of the Difficult Second Series: after wowing us in 2023 and even earlier, shows like The Tourist, Extraordinary, The Rig, Suspect and Bad Sisters are on the way back for another helping this year, but the question is: will they live up to series one?

In among this, a trio of behemoth shows coming back: Doctor Who will return for series 14, or season one as it’s being styled, the first with Fifteenth Doctor Ncuti Gatwa, Wolf Hall is returning after nine years to cover the late Hilary Mantel’s final book in the trilogy, The Mirror and The Light, and dystopian anthology series Black Mirror will return to Netflix for its seventh series. There’s even talk of a prequel series to Red Dwarf, if that comes off.

This is our round-up of the British TV shows we’re most excited to see returning for new...

Now is your chance to find out how to sing like Julie Garland, deal with being Edina Monsoon’s Pa and play a critically acclaimed chicken

It surprised a lot of people when Bubbles, the dippy personal assistant from Absolutely Fabulous, turned out to have a belter of a singing voice. Jane Horrocks showed off her chops in the 1998 film Little Voice having already conquered the stage with the lead role in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice.

Since then, Horrocks has become part of the fabric of the nation. On the big screen, she’s voiced a knitting-loving chicken in 2000’s Chicken Run and a duck opposite Bill Murray’s Garfield. In the flesh, she appeared in Dexter Fletcher’s Proclaimers jukebox musical Sunshine on Leith, and opposite Rob Brydon in 2018 sports comedy Swimming With Men. On stage she appeared in Stephen Poliakoff drama Sweet Panic and sang songs by Joy Division,...

A micro-budget and scrappy energy add charm to this quirky sci-fi tale in which unremarkable people watch over their charges

Peter (Scott Haran) is a former child chess prodigy who these days excels at nothing much in particular, except perhaps his ability to blend into the background. A birthday card at his office is handed to him to sign – for his own birthday. None of his colleagues know who he is, and the card is crammed with polite, anodyne messages. But he discovers that there’s one arena in which his anonymity might be a boon rather than a liability: he is recruited into the world of Bystanding, a parallel universe filled with invisible guardian types whose job is to imperceptibly guide or nudge their charges into making better life choices. They are all, in their own ways, as unremarkable as Peter, hence their selection for bystander duty.

There’s...

No Spaced. No The League of Gentlemen. No Smack the Pony or Goodness Gracious Me or The Royle Family or Brass Eye, or Red Dwarf or Father Ted or anything that belongs to the last century (side note: the late 90s were an incredible time for UK comedy). These are the 40 finest British comedy TV shows that have arrived since the year 2000, as nominated by our writers. Add in your favourites below, and it’s a party.

What’s cheering about this lot, apart from the fact that as comedies, they should all technically cheer us up, is how different they are. There’s the surreal chaos of Year of the Rabbit, and the sweet warmth of Lovesick, the Pythonesque bonkersness of Yonderland, the satirical might of The Thick of It and much more. Something for everyone, you might say.

And to make sure there was enough space to include a wide enough selection,...

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (Csse) has hit something of a wall. The company reported its second quarter 2023 earnings this week, and while total revenue was up year-over-year, it fell well short of Wall Street expectations. The company’s stock price has taken a beating, falling to $0.88 per share in after-hours trading on Monday amidst news that it had absorbed a net loss of $43.7 million during the quarter.

The numbers suggest that Csse is having a tougher time digesting last year's purchase of Redbox than anticipated. Both CEO Bill Rouhana and CFO Jason Meier said during their conference call to discuss the report with analysts and investors that the company planned to “streamline” aspects of its businesses to help boost revenue flows, which means cuts could be coming to its streaming platforms Redbox and Crackle.

Sign Up $0 / month redbox.com

Redbox and Crackle are both free, ad-supported streaming platforms,...

Our favorite angel and demon duo are back in “Good Omens” Season 2: All six episodes hit Prime Video streaming on July 28. This time around, the odd couple is tasked with helping hide Gabriel (Jon Hamm) from both sides of the celestial divide until he can regain his memory.

Here are the returning and new characters and what other projects you may have seen the cast in before.

(Prime Video)

David Tennant as Crowley

Tennant, best known as the 10th Doctor on “Doctor Who,” plays fallen angel Crowley, whose relationship with Aziraphale pre-dates the creation of humans. The stylish demon often finds himself afoul of both heaven and hell. The Scottish actor also starred in “Broadchurch” and Marvel’s “Jessica Jones.”

(Prime Video)

Michael Sheen as Aziraphale

The Welsh actor, whose films include “Underworld,” “Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen,” plays fussy angel Aziraphale. Unlike his fellow cherubim, he has developed a...

Warning: This contains spoilers for Not Going Out

Back in 2015, during a BBC Breakfast interview about series seven of Not Going Out, presenter Bill Turnbull asked Lee Mack: “Did you ever imagine when you first got that pilot that you’d get seven series?”

“I didn’t think we’d even get a series,” Mack answers incredulously, explaining that even going from script to a pilot episode felt like “the biggest hurdle”.

And yet, eight years later (17 since the show began in 2006), Not Going Out has now almost doubled its series from seven to 13, still regularly pulling in audiences of over four million, with the newest series arriving on BBC One on Friday 23rd June at 9pm. As ever, the show will focus on Lee Mack as a fictionalised version of himself, alongside his landlady-turned-wife and sparring partner Lucy, and their eventful and often farcical life together.

Series 13 will...

A gloriously intricate replica of Red Dwarf’s cluttered Sleeping Quarters by BRO3 has just passed 10,000 supporters on Lego Ideas.

The detailed 1,953-brick build comes with five minifigs – Dave Lister, Arnold J. Rommer, Kryten, Cat, and Kristine Kochanski – and tons of in-jokes and references, including Dwane Dibbley’s thermos and the Polymorth in his rabbit and sausage forms.

Whether you want the inside skinny on Logan Roy, Hannibal Lecktor, Winston Churchill or King Lear, the mighty Scottish actor will be here to tell all

Brian Cox needs no introduction – other than the usual one establishing which Brian Cox we’re talking about. This one is the 76-year-old Dundee-born actor, who started his career as a classically trained Shakespearean thespian, who played opposite Laurence Olivier in King Lear in 1983. His performances in Rob Roy and Braveheart shot him into the mainstream. Roles soon followed in The Long Kiss Goodnight and Super Troopers. Turns out Treadstone was all his fault in 2002’s The Bourne Identity. And if he’d been a bit nicer to the apes in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, perhaps they wouldn’t have taken over the world. Silly Brian.

Cox can still boast he was the original Dr Hannibal Lecter (or Lecktor), in Michael Mann...

The expansion of free streaming services continues unabated. On Wednesday, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (Csse) shared some details on its ever-expanding reach and upcoming original programming at the Iab Newfronts in New York. A month after launching a new advertising sales division known as Crackle Connex, Csse reports having an audience of over 80 million monthly active users, up 100% year-over-year.

This rapid expansion was aided by the company acquiring Redbox last May, giving Csse an out-of-home presence, but the majority of the growth comes from the addition of over 160 channels on the company’s free ad-supported streaming TV (Fast) and ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) services.

Watch Now $0 / month crackle.com

Csse also benefited from the addition of Crackle and Redbox buttons on [Vizio Smart TV] remotes, making the free streaming services even easier to access and front-of-mind for viewers. Thanks to new deals with the likes of Crunchyroll, Funimation, Vidgo,...

Last week, seemingly out of nowhere, the usually relatively quiet Red Dwarf Twitter account announced this:

#RedDwarf #RedDwarfReborn@realrobgrant @DougRDNaylor @CCfunkandsoul Chris Barrie @DannyJohnJules @bobbyllew @normanlovett1 Hattie Hayridge @Tordfc pic.twitter.com/LQH9LPgWRB

— Red Dwarf (@RedDwarfHQ) March 10, 2023

The statement read:

“Rob Grant and Doug Naylor are delighted to announce that the ongoing dispute over the Red Dwarf rights has been resolved.

Moving onwards and upwards, Rob and Doug hope to launch separate iterations of Red Dwarf across various media, working again with the cast and other valued partners, and wish each other the very best.

Smoke a kipper, Red Dwarf will be back for breakfast!!” (sic)

This came as a bit of a bolt from the blue, particularly among anyone who hadn’t been closely following the show since its last special, ‘The Promised Land’, in 2020.

Trouble on the Dwarf

Those who had been following the show’s fortunes...

It's an old adage that comedy doesn't travel well, but some shows definitely fare better than others. As a Brit, I've met many Americans with a creepy zeal for quoting sketches from "Monty Python's Flying Circus" at me. "Red Dwarf" is hugely popular where I live in the Czech Republic. And the bawdy BBC sitcom "'Allo! 'Allo!" sold to 56 countries -- the cast was reportedly greeted "like the Beatles" during a visit to Bulgaria. I once had the pleasure of dining at a pizza restaurant in the Serbian capital of Belgrade called 'Allo! 'Allo! where all the pies were named after the characters.

But one British sitcom that doesn't seem to travel well is also one of our most enduringly popular, "Only Fools and Horses." The show follows the fortunes of the Trotter family, headed by a dodgy wheeler-dealer whose dubious get-rich-quick schemes always go disastrously wrong. It aired from...

The premise for the long-running sci-fi sitcom "Red Dwarf" is as hilarious as it is existentially troubling. On the show's titular mining ship, a ne'er-do-well slugabed named Dave Lister (Craig Charles) is thrown into the ship's suspended animation prison for a minor infraction. When the ship's sentient computer Holly (Norman Lovett) releases Lister from captivity, he finds that two million years have passed following a radiation accident that killed the crew. The ship has been adrift in the cosmos ever since, and its exact location is unknown. In order to prevent Lister from going mad from loneliness, the computer creates an interactive hologram of his old roommate, a snotty, incompetent do-gooder named Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie). They hate each other but have to work together as they may be the last vestiges of humanity. 

Also on the ship is a mysterious, well-dressed dandy with no name (Danny John-Jules) who is,...

In space, no one can hear you grumble about your s****y job. The title sequence for "Red Dwarf" opens with a guy in a grubby spacesuit, miserably daubing paint on the exterior of the eponymous mining vessel. When the camera pulls back we can see why he's unhappy; he is working on the "F" of the ship's name which must be about 80 feet high.

It could be a scene from "Dark Star" or "Alien," two movies that showed us that space travel will be pretty boring and arduous for the regular Joes who keep the lights on during long hauls between the stars. Those films provided inspiration for "Red Dwarf" writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, who set their cult British show on a spaceship three million years in the future. Only one of its characters is a living human, but that doesn't stop them from following the classic...

I was still dressed as a mummy when I sat down to watch TV after trick-or-treating on Halloween night in 1992. I was a skinny lad, so binding my limbs tightly in bandages made me look more like a weird spindly white insect than King Tut. Self-conscious of this, I wore my Adidas bench coat over the costume, which completely ruined the effect.

I couldn't tell you what my costume was 12 months earlier or the following year, but Halloween of '92 remains so clear in my mind because that was the night of "Ghostwatch." I loved anything related to the supernatural, so I just couldn't wait: The BBC was conducting a live paranormal investigation into poltergeist activity! It was a big event heavily publicized in the run-up to Halloween, and 11 million viewers tuned in that night. The next day the whole country was talking about it.

"Ghostwatch" wasn't a real live ghost hunt,...

The X-Files, for all its later imitators was a unique show. One aspect of that uniqueness was the way it blended mytharc episodes about alien abductions, alien invasions, and government conspiracies with Monster of the Week episodes about paranormal criminals. These usually had a pretty strong thread of horror running through them and dealt with some classic “horror” creatures – vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, among others. They also devoted a large number of episodes to serial killers with varying degrees of paranormal abilities, since Mulder and Scully were FBI agents and a murder spree was the most obvious reason to put them on a case.

And so, for Halloween, we present the 13 scariest hours of The X-Files for your viewing pleasure!

13. The Host

The ‘Flukeman’, the Monster of the Week in ‘The Host’, is best remembered for one of freakiest monster designs of the series. Played by one of the show...

Flatmates have always been a goldmine for sitcoms, but the format was especially abundant on British TV in the '90s. You had Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson beating the crap out of each other in ultra-violent slapstick fashion in "Bottom," Ben Chaplin playing an agoraphobic roomie from hell in "Game On," and two guys talking about boobs and drinking beer in the roaringly popular and very laddish "Men Behaving Badly." Even "Red Dwarf" was basically the same formula, just set on a spacecraft three million years in the future where one flatmate was an android and another evolved from the ship's cat. Then you had "Friends" on its immensely successful Channel 4 run, like an affluent and super good-looking acquaintance wafting into a party full of slightly down-at-heel guests to dazzle with its slick writing and to-die-for New York apartments.

Each show had its own specific style, but nothing...

In Clive Barker's original short story "The Forbidden," published in Volume Five of his "Books of Blood" (called "In the Flesh" in the United States), the character of Helen is studying graffiti patterns in Liverpool as part of her college thesis research into urban legends. A lot of language in the original short story is devoted to the horrors of big city blight, and Helen aims to write a paper on "the semiotics of urban despair." As she delves further into Liverpool, she encounters repeated painted representations of the Candyman, a yellow-skinned ghoul with sharpened teeth and a hook hand, who is said to have committed many horrendous acts of violence in the neighborhood. In true Barker fashion, the protagonist's obsessions get the better of her, and she continues to probe until she encounters the actual Candyman. 

Bernard Rose's 1992 film adaptation, "Candyman," transposes the action from Liverpool to Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing projects,...

For years, Awesome Art We’ve Found Around The Net has been about two things only – awesome art and the artists that create it. With that in mind, we thought why not take the first week of the month to showcase these awesome artists even more? Welcome to “Awesome Artist We’ve Found Around The Net.” In this column, we are focusing on one artist and the awesome art that they create, whether they be amateur, up and coming, or well established. The goal is to uncover these artists so even more people become familiar with them. We ask these artists a few questions to see their origins, influences, and more. If you are an awesome artist or know someone that should be featured, feel free to contact me at any time at theodorebond@joblo.com.This month we are very pleased to bring you the awesome art of

Doaly...

Lenny Von Dohlen, best known for playing Harold Smith on Twin Peaks, has died.

He was 63.

The actor's sister, Catherine Von Dohlen, shared the news in a Facebook post this week.

"The world lost a magnificent man on July 5. Brother Len was passionate about everything and everyone," the social media post reads. 

"He was always leading; whether it be riveting conversation, an artistic creation or a trip to new places. He loved a good laugh."

"He continues on his spiritual journey. Living life full in his memory," Catherine wrote.

Von Dohlen appeared on four episodes of Twin Peaks, as well as the spinoff movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

He played Harold, an acquaintance of Laura Palmer, the character whose death kicked off the series premiere.

Laura gave her secret diary to Harold, but her friends wanted access to it to help investigate her murder.

His arc on the...

Lenny Von Dohlen, who played Harold Smith on the hit series “Twin Peaks,” died on Tuesday, his agent confirmed to Variety. He was 63.

His sister Catherine Von Dohlen first announced his death Thursday morning on Facebook. No cause of death was given. “The world lost a magnificent man on July 5. Brother Len was passionate about everything and everyone. He was always leading; whether it be riveting conversation, an artistic creation or a trip to new places. He loved a good laugh. He continues on his spiritual journey. Living life full in his memory,” she wrote.

On “Twin Peaks” and the prequel film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” Von Dohlen played the agoraphobic Harold Smith, who refused to leave his house. Sheryl Lee’s character, Laura Palmer, gave Harold her secret diary, and after her murder, her friend Donna Hayward befriended Harold while investigating Laura’s death. However, Harold’s...

This article contains major Choose or Die spoilers.

Choose or Die is bound to surprise Netflix subscribers who are perhaps hoping for some lighter high concept horror when they give this new movie a spin: it does rather go for the jugular, in some cases literally! It also has a final act that unwraps its very weird central mystery, while perhaps even setting up an intriguing sequel for the streaming service to dish out at a later date.

In Toby Meakins’ grim mash-up of Jumanji, Ring, Black Mirror, and Red Dwarf (more on this later!), we meet a young coder called Kayla (Iola Evans) whose life is not going particularly well. Kayla works as a cleaner at a mysterious office that a local business called Kismet is supposedly occupying, but no one seems to have really been there in a long time. Kayla’s brother recently drowned at a local pool,...

Exclusive: Channel 4’s Craig Charles-hosted daytime format Moneybags has become the network’s first show from its £30M ($40.6M) Global Format Fund to be recommissioned for a second season.

The fund is intended for international-facing formats that will appeal to both UK and global audiences and can be sold around the world.

Four have been commissioned so far, of which Moneybags, from former Endemol execs Lucas Church and David Flynn’s Youngest Media’s northern English hub, is the first to be given a second series and will air another 30 episodes later this year.

The high-stakes quiz tests contestants’ ability to think quickly as they answer each question by grabbing a moneybag with the correct answer when it passes along a conveyor belt. Those who grab the right answer earn that bag’s value, which can be anything from £1,000 to £100,000. Contestants risk losing everything if they pick up the wrong bag.

Science fiction television always seems to get second chances more than any other genre on the small screen. Shows like “Star Trek” have spawned multiple incarnations after the original series was canceled back in the 1960s, “Doctor Who” had its own resurrection too, George Clooney is working with Legendary on a new “Buck Rogers” series, Peacock is moving forward with the third incarnation of “Battlestar Galactica,” Netflix is wrapping up on “Lost In Space.” Even the British cult series “Red Dwarf” keeps chugging along.

Continue reading ‘Babylon 5’ Series Reboot Written By Creator J. Michael Straczynski Heading To The CW at The Playlist.

Exclusive: The BBC’s head of comedy Kate Daughton and comedy commissioner Sarah Asante are both leaving the British broadcaster after more than five years, Deadline hears.

Daughton is stepping down after first joining the BBC in April 2016. She declined to comment on her next move, but there is speculation that she could return to program making. Daughton previously produced Matt Berry’s BAFTA-winning Toast, a show that she helped revive for the BBC earlier this year, with the cult character heading to Hollywood.

During her time at the BBC, Daughton’s commissioning credits included the second season of Emmy-winning Fleabag and two seasons of Stephen Merchant’s upcoming community service series The Offenders, which will star Christopher Walken and is co-produced by Amazon. Other hits on her watch included Ghosts and Steve Coogan’s This Time With Alan Partridge.

Meanwhile, Asante is joining UKTV as a commissioning editor. She...

Exclusive: BBC Studios has been ambitious and wide-ranging in its search for a new chief executive, but after nearly six months of recruiting, sources say that BBC director general Tim Davie is no closer to landing the big name he desires.

Deadline has spoken to several well-placed sources about why the executive hunt, which began in July last year, is yet to be resolved at a crucial time for the Doctor Who and Top Gear producer, as it grapples with the headwinds of coronavirus and the quickening revolution in streaming.

Running BBC Studios remains one of the most prized jobs in the British industry, overseeing a £1.4 billion ($1.9B) empire of production, distribution, and broadcasting assets. But it has proved to be the wrong job or the wrong time for a number of high-profile candidates approached by Egon Zehnder headhunters.

Deadline understands that Davie, himself the former CEO of BBC Studios,...

Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi will take part in a live Q&a hosted by Kenneth Branagh over Zoom on November 29 to benefit the UK’s theater community.

The event is being put on to aid UK workers who have struggled during the pandemic. Tickets cost £45 and are limited. Proceeds are going to Acting for Others, of which Dench is president, which provides financial and emotional support for professionals in the theater biz.

The elements of the show are being kept secret from both the audience and the cast. It is being produced by Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant, The Young Ones director Paul Jackson and the actor and producer Richard Clifford.

Hands up who’s been singing ‘Goldfish-ohs nibbling at my toes’ for the last 32 years.

Not continuously. You’d be arrested. But on every occasion you’ve sung the Red Dwarf theme song in the past three decades – over the top of an episode’s opening credits, say, or alone, in the bath, you’ve sung that as the seventh line instead of the real lyric which is ‘Goldfish shoals’.

Don’t feel bad about it. Probably, when you first heard the song at age eight, you didn’t know the word ‘shoal’, but you did, thanks to global consumerism and the virulence of 1980s America’s pop cultural hegemony, know what Cheerios were, so your brain did the rest. It’s not worth beating yourself up over. We’re all just doing the best we can.

The point is, according to Red Dwarf composer Howard Goodall, who also came...

Steve Coogan’s production company Baby Cow Prods., whose CEO is former BBC Films chief Christine Langan, has appointed Rupert Majendie as head of comedy development.

Majendie produced BAFTA-nominated BBC series “Pls Like,” starring Liam Williams and Tim Key, Nick Helm’s “Heavy Entertainment” for BBC Three, and, most recently, the new Tom Davis and James de Frond BBC One sitcom “King Gary.” For film, he is in production with Film4 and the BFI on funded feature “Brian and Charles,” written by David Earl and Chris Hayward.

Alongside his television credits, Majendie also created online comedy platform mr box, originating ideas that have gone on to be adapted for other mediums including Romesh Ranganathan’s “Hip Hop Saved My Life” and Earl and Hayward’s “Brian and Charles.”

Coogan, Baby Cow’s creative director, said: “Rupert is at the vanguard of the emergent generation of comedy writers and performers. He has intuitive good taste.

Red Dwarf has been a lot of different shows, probably more than any science fiction show that’s kept the same principal cast in place for its entire run. Over the last 32 years it has been a zero-budget flatmate comedy with plots that could be filmed exclusively between a corridor and a bunk bed, a big old high concept episodic sci-fi show that used philosophy to make gags, it’s had a long-running ‘Hunt for Red Dwarf’ arc that lasted two seasons, then reintroduced all the crew it killed off in its first episode, then killed them all again and returned to odd-couple sitcom shenanigans.

Sometimes it is, by sitcom standards, actually pretty hard sci-fi, set in a universe with no alien life, the drama and comedy driven by the isolation of being the last human alive. Other times you can’t seem to move five feet without bumping into...

Two years after series Xii aired on Dave back in October 2017, confirmation arrived that Red Dwarf was coming back to TV, but not (yet) in the form of a full series Xiii. Instead, the boys from the Dwarf were returning for a feature-length special.

Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules, Robert Llewellyn and Norman Lovett will all appear in ‘The Promised Land’, a 90-minute episode due to air this April on Dave.

Regrettably, the London press screening and cast Q&a for ‘The Promised Land’ had to be cancelled due to the global spread of Covid-19, but here’s all the latest about the new episode, including a teaser trailer and the beautiful new poster.

Red Dwarf: The Geek Lowdown

How many series are there? 12 (including ‘Back To Life’) with a 90-minute special on the way

Renewed or cancelled? So far, only the extended special has been officially confirmed

Air date confirmed?...

Czech director-screenwriter-author Pavel Göbl explores the rather unusual idea of vertical burials with his latest project. Czech film and television director, screenwriter, producer and author Pavel Göbl (whose last feature film was the black-and-white dramedy Supervising the Meaning of Dreams in 2018) is in post-production with his latest feature-length project, the tragicomedy Silent Companion. Göbl is adapting his own novel of the same name, his literary debut for which he won the domestic Discovery of the Year Award, and which, in fact, he originally adapted from the screenplay (which scooped the Rwe Award for the best as-yet-unmade script). His literary works are written in an absurd style. Silent Companion is no different, billed as a rural...