You remember how it was a few years ago. When the BBC announced that they were going to update Sherlock Holmes to the modern age, complete with mobile phones and blogs. It was all a bit worrying, wasn’t it?
‘I think, sir,’ a boatman from Cornwall famously once remarked to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘when Holmes fell over that cliff, he may not have killed himself, but all the same he was never quite the same man afterwards.’
So, the turkey corpse has been devoured, it suddenly sinks in that The Snowman’s Aled Jones is now 42 and presenting ITV’s Daybreak. Things are getting bleaker by the minute and it soon becomes apparent you need something to help you through these dark days. You need a Big-Ass Spider.
‘Marriage changes people’, Mrs Hudson coos in ‘The Sign of Three’, oblivious to the fact that, in the very books she sprang from, marriage was always but a footnote in John Watson’s adventures with Holmes.
Cinema is a young person’s game. How many Hollywood-produced films do you see where the main cast are all “of a certain age”? Sure, there are great roles for older actors in most films, but a whole movie of older performers? Very rare.
The first instalment of this two-part finale left us with Princess Ariadne sentenced to a traitor’s death; her fate sealed after the revelation that she aided Jason’s escape from the palace in the aftermath of his failed assassination attempt on Queen Pasiphae.
Hot on the heels of last Christmas’s really rather excellent Treasure Island, Sky1 have set their sights on another literary adaptation: John Meade Falkner’s swashbuckling tale of smugglers on the South Coast, Moonfleet.
Ben Stiller is one of those performers who’s created such a recognisable niche in comedy that he’s almost become a genre in and of himself.
If you go and see a Ben Stiller film, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. That’s not a criticism – Stiller is an able performer, and frequently very funny. With The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, however, Stiller defies expectations and proves that he has far more strings to his bow.
Downton Abbey never fails to over-promise and under-deliver. There is, at least, a kind of consistency in this; but it makes for exasperating viewing. After the calamitous events of last Christmas’s festive episode, this year, writer Julian Fellowes was taking no chances. Like an over-cautious Christmas tree decorator, he sought to take his characters out … >
Matt Smith was magnificent – never more so than as the aged toymaker whittling away at his wood. Raggedy man, we shall miss you. But then, you knew that already.