Recent viewing, Radio 7, Angus Deayton, new on BBC America
Radio 7:
Okay, it's not strictly telly but it is, thanks to the generous cross pollination between wireless and boob tube, telly related. The BBC will be launching, this upcoming December, a new digital radio service featuring the best of their spoken word archives. That means hours of classic comedy, drama, mystery and sci-fi everyday -including lots of familiar series and performers from the telly side of things. From Tony Hancock to The League of Gentlemen to Doctor Who, many top telly programs either started out as radio programs, recorded radio versions of TV episodes or continued brand new storylines on the radio.
Radio 7 will be available, streamed, over the internet starting Dec 15.
Radioactive Angus
Another radio/telly crossover of note recently is Angus Deayton (best known here as the Victor Meldrew's put upon neighbor in One Foot in the Grave) whose rather sordid personal life has been getting such a thorough, and occasionally vicious, airing in the press that he was sacked from his longstanding gig as host of the hilarious topical news quiz Have I Got News For You. Fortunately for the smug, but awfully talented chap, he's getting a fair amount of good publicity as well as the twentieth anniversary of the inspired radio comedy Radio Active approaches.
Radio Active, which featured Deayton as both a writer and performer, followed the inept programming of a fictional national radio station with themed episodes (Call ins, travel) peppered with spot on pop song parodies. How good was radioactive? Not only was their an eventual, very funny, TV spin off KYTV, but cast member/writer Geoffrey Perkins only ended up as the BBC's head of TV comedy.
BBC America
a-List COMEDY
Whoopi Goldberg hosts this look at the best of British comedy through
interviews with their stars, copious clips and viewer polls. Likely to be heavy
on material featured on BBC America a-List comedy premiers Dec 1.
Wire in the Blood
Hunky Robson Green (Soldier, Soldier -
Touching Evil) stars in this edgy crime drama as "...as
a brilliant, complex criminal profiler, these hard-hitting stories take a vivid,
intense journey into the minds of dangerous killers and the profiler who hunts
them down." Or
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