समाचार

My friend Don Fairservice, who has died aged 92, was a creative film editor and film-maker. Active in his youth as an actor and set designer with the Mountview Theatre Club in London, he became fascinated by the details of making films, their structures and meanings, and this led to a long career as a editor for the BBC and with numerous directors.

Don edited more than 40 films and TV series, and won a Bafta in 1989 for the Channel 4 series A Very British Coup. Other editing projects included Me and Mrs Jones (2002), The Railway Children (2000), The Scarlet Tunic (1998), Emma (1996), Beautiful Thing (1996), The Hanging Gale (1995) and Chattahoochee (1989).

Earlier this month, Doctor Who history was made with the unveiling of the mini-episode 'The Night of the Doctor', which finally answered fans' questions about the fate of the eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann.

As the actor with the shortest run in Doctor Who, we had less of an opportunity to get to know him, so we thought it a good time to round up ten things you might not already know about Paul McGann.

1. Paul McGann was born in 1959 in Kensington, Liverpool. He was the third of six children to his teacher mother and metallurgist father. His three brothers, Joseph, Mark and Stephen, are also actors and have starred alongside Paul in the series The Hanging Gale as well as the TV film Catherine the Great.

2. It's not just acting that interests Paul, he's also a keen singer. In fact, having been heard singing in the TV series The Monocled Mutineer,...

Kieran Kinsella

Appropriately enough for this time of year, Acorn Media’s latest batch of DVD releases includes The Fall. It’s a Belfast based psychological crime drama in which Dsi Stella Gibson attempts to hunt down a sadistic serial killer who seems to delight in deviousness. Somewhat unusually for a crime drama, the killer is identified fairly early on as Paul Spector. Thereafter, Spector and Gibson become embroiled in a game of cat and mouse that lasts through five suspensful episodes. The relationship between Spector and Gibson is similar to the one involving Hannibal Lector and Clarice except for the fact that Lector was banged up while Spector is on the loose.

X-Files actress Gillian Anderson takes on the role of Gibson and she seems quite at home on British TV these days having enjoyed success in recent hits such as Great Expectations. Her nemesis is the rather less...

Call the Midwife. BBC

Kieran Kinsella

Season one of Call The Midwife was a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Heidi Thomas (Upstairs Downstairs) did an amazing job of adapting Jennifer Worth’s characters for the small screen. Millions of fans laughed, wept and cheered as Jenny, Chummy and friends delivered babies and helped some of London’s poorest folks to rise above their lot in life.

Season two, was arguably even better than the first season of the show because we didn’t have to waste time with introductions. We just jumped straight into the action as Sister Evangelina and Trixie risked life and limb to deliver a baby aboard a cargo ship. The first episode of season two set a tone and a tempo that was to remain in place for the rest of the 2013′s new episodes. Without giving too much away, we saw one nurse give birth,...