News

Mark Harrison Aug 5, 2016

Hello! From Armageddon to Harry Potter, we salute the screen work of Mr Jason Isaacs...

This feature contains spoilers for Event Horizon and the Harry Potter films. This spoiler warning contains spoilers for the list.

Hello to Jason Isaacs! Through roles in an impressive array of movies, from indies to massive blockbusters on both sides of the pond, he's become one of our favourite character actors. We've found that no matter how the film turns out, you can guarantee that if he's in it, his performance is going to be one of the highlights.

Off-screen, Isaacs has a whole other profile of popularity. Out of several prominent celebrity fans of Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's film review show on BBC Radio 5 Live, he's the patron saint of their “church of Wittertainment”, and “hello to Jason Isaacs” is the show's first, most popular catchphrase.

Some might argue...

The complete first season of hit comedy Sirens is coming to DVD on March 12th – and to celebrate we’ve got three copies to give away!

Sirens stars British Comedy Award winner Kayvan Novak (Facejacker, Four Lions), Richard Madden (Birdsong, Game of Thrones), Rhys Thomas (Shooting Stars, Bellamy’s People), and Amy Beth Hayes (Secret Diary of a Call Girl) in the six-part comedy drama set in Leeds from Brian Fillis, (The Curse of Steptoe, An Englishman in New York) inspired by real life ambulance technician Tom Reynolds’ novel - Blood, Sweat and Tea’.

Swept along by an endless tide of bodily fluids (rarely their own), the trio of world-weary paramedics bicker, fight and shag their way through the darkly funny maelstrom of their lives. Behind the uniforms, the sirens and the fast driving, they are three ordinary blokes trying to make it through yet another shift. But once they...

The complete first season of hit comedy Sirens is coming to DVD on March 12th – and to celebrate we’ve got three copies to give away!

Sirens stars British Comedy Award winner Kayvan Novak (Facejacker, Four Lions), Richard Madden (Birdsong, Game of Thrones), Rhys Thomas (Shooting Stars, Bellamy’s People), and Amy Beth Hayes (Secret Diary of a Call Girl) in the six-part comedy drama set in Leeds from Brian Fillis, (The Curse of Steptoe, An Englishman in New York) inspired by real life ambulance technician Tom Reynolds’ novel – Blood, Sweat and Tea’.

Swept along by an endless tide of bodily fluids (rarely their own), the trio of world-weary paramedics bicker, fight and shag their way through the darkly funny maelstrom of their lives. Behind the uniforms, the sirens and the fast driving, they are three ordinary blokes trying to make it through yet another shift. But once they’ve...

Filming has begun on new Channel 4 comedy-drama Naked Apes. The six-part series, created by The Curse of Steptoe scribe Brian Fillis, is inspired by the Tom Reynolds book Blood, Sweat and Tea and will focus on the lives of three world-weary paramedics. Four Lions star Kayvan Novak will star as the womanising Rachid, while Game of Thrones actor Richard Madden will play handsome paramedic Ashley. Star Stories comic Rhys Thomas and Misfits actress Amy Beth Hayes will also appear as the misanthropic Stuart and his best friend Maxine (more)...

Nostalgic retellings of the lives of Tony Hancock, Kenneth Williams, and Eric & Ernie have been ratings winners, but fictionalised accounts can land the Beeb in hot water

Ooh, I say. How's the harness?" We're four minutes and 58 seconds into BBC4's Hattie and the biopic cliche klaxon is primed to emit its first parp of distress. Plonked amid the bustle of a busy panto rehearsal, Eric Sykes (played, somewhat disconcertingly, by Graham Fellows) winces in sympathy as co-star Hattie Jacques (Ruth "Nessa" Jones), squeezes her fairy princess-costumed frame into some manner of hoist. Mugging gamely ("Lucky I'm not planning on having any more children …") Jacques is hoisted swiftly over the empty stage, her matronly limbs swishing in time to the soundtrack's plinky-twinkly piano. Then, inevitably – vzzzzznnng! – the mechanism fizzles to a halt. As offscreen lackeys scramble with levers and pulleys, Jacques is left to dangle pinkly in mid-air, a vision...

As John Hurt reprises his role as the flamboyant raconteur and gay icon, Quentin Crisp, in An Englishman in New York, Ben Walters traces the writer's legacy in the Big Apple

"I don't believe in abroad," John Hurt's Quentin Crisp says towards the end of The Naked Civil Servant, the 1975 Thames Television drama that made Hurt a star and Crisp an icon. Before long, Crisp would revise his opinion: after his new-found fame led to him performing in New York in 1978, he fell in love with the city and, forsaking his self-appointed status as one of the stately homos of England, relocated there in 1981, aged 72. He would remain one of its most celebrated resident aliens for the remaining 18 years of his life.

Now that period is the subject of its own ITV film, An Englishman in New York, which takes its title from the song Sting wrote about Crisp.