Reviews

The DVD of this was, without a doubt, the most successful Christmas present my kids received this festivetide. My three-year old is particularly enthusiastic, which goes to show what colourful and undemanding fare this is. As a member of the generation that can remember watching the original series, the main thing that has stuck with me is how stilted and downright slow it all used to be. Puppets, of course, but there never seemed to be any plots or dialogue that were worthy of live-action treatment, and they all felt dreadfully padded out to me, even when I was nine. The movie, though, is still diverting me, even though I have now been obliged to watch it seven times, and have to play the CD of the theme tune over and over again on every car journey.

One thing I would point out - in the trivia section there is mention made of the use of marionette hands for close ups as a gag. This gag was first done, and with a great deal of class, in a TV show called The Preventers, so this has been ripped off. So there.

I remember this as a rather odd affair, very male, not particularly woman friendly. A world where blokes are blokey and great, with lovable eccentricities, and women are for ogling - here merely disguised rather than mitigated by romantic pseudo poetic posturing. Rachel Weisz is lovely, but not a real woman, very definitely a male fantasy figure. This felt rather curious, especially when compared with An Evening With Gary Lineker, in which the characters, both male and female, were much better drawn. The attention to detail in the football seemed much better in that other play too, here it seemed rather desultory - a sequence of blokes cheering when goals went in and looking glum when they didn't. To sum up, really rather drippy, almost as wet as Morrissey's mustache as he sipped coffee by the Seine in a ludicrous, introspective setup that a teenager would have been embarrassed to have come up with. Shallow, silly, mooning, wet, not connected to the real world. Check out Lineker - it's much better.

This is a wonderfully funny one-off spoof of all those impossibly cool sixties adventure shows, in which suave polo-neck clad heroes and girls in leather catsuits battle to outwit crazed villains with plans to take over the world. The bad guy in this is Lord Belvoir St Nash ("it's pronounced 'beaversnatch'") who wants to become part of the evil Consortium, which is taking over the world (of course) by brainwashing everyone into believing it is the 1960s.

All the cast are great - Robert Harley as the smooth but dim Craig Sturdy, Morwenna Banks as the enigmatic Penny Gold, and Chris England as "the third one", Mike Stallion. The high-class gags come thick and fast - I particularly like the Thunderbirds reversal, using obviously fake hands for the close ups, and the Mysterons' answer machine message - and there are some top comedy brains at work here. The only disappointment is that they only did one of these.

This spoof of the classic EM Forster adaptations that were all the rage a few years ago rattles along nicely, with some nicely-turned humour. Most of the actors understand that this sort of thing needs to be underplayed, but Ustinov for one goes piling over the top in time-honoured fashion.

A good-looking harmless bit of fun which should have got more attention than it did.

This is a glossy, holiday programme version of Smith and England's stage classic. Opening it out to include scenes in airports, and around the island of Ibiza, means that some of the claustrophobic intensity of the play is lost, but the script is indestructable and provides plenty of laughs. Clive Owen and Martin Clunes are good, but Andy Taylor and Nick Hancock in the stage original were better. Caroline Quentin is great, as ever, and Lizzy McInnerny battles with a rogue accent throughout. The slight disappointment is Paul Merton, not much of an actor, who doesn't get the most out of a role originally created by co-author Chris England on the stage.

Even so, this is a pretty good stab at filming a perennial favourite play. The characters are funny, the ending is still great, and Lineker himself appears for good measure. Recommended.