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British actor Kenneth Cope, a popular TV and film star in the 1960s and ’70s thanks to leading appearances in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Coronation Street, has died. He was 93.

Cope’s former agent Sandra Chalmers, of The Artists Partnership, announced that he died at his home in the northern seaside town of Southport in Sefton, Liverpool, the area where he was born in 1931.

Renny Lister, Cope’s wife of 63 years, and family members, including actor daughter Martha Cope, were by his side. He is also survived by children Nick and Mark.

Chalmers said Cope was an “incredible icon of British TV & film.” Cope and Lister met in 1961 when they both joined the cast of long-running ITV soap Coronation Street. He played petty crook Jed Stone as a semi-regular through the early and mid-1960s. He later returned to the role after an absence of 42 years.

He honed his...

Veteran TV host and comedy writer Denis Norden has died aged 96, his family has said.

Best known as the frontman for long-running ITV blooper show It’ll Be Alright On The Night, Norden died on Wednesday morning following a spell in a London hospital. He hosted the hit ITV series from 1977 until his retirement aged 84 in 2006.

After an early career working in cinemas, Norden began scriptwriting during the Second World War. He wrote his first script for the BBC at the age of 19 and from 1948 to 1959, he co-wrote the successful BBC Radio comedy programme Take It From Here with comic Frank Muir with whom he was a regular collaborator.

Norden also wrote a number of film scrips in the 1960s and 70s, including Paramount comedy The Bliss Of Mrs Blossom, starring Shirley MacLaine and Richard Attenborough, United Artists rom-com Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell (which scored a WGA nomination) with Gina Lollobrigida,...

The BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped returns to BFI Southbank this December to present British television rediscoveries, not seen by audiences for decades, most since their original transmission dates…. The bespoke line-up of TV gems feature some of the countries most-loved television celebrities and iconic characters including Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part: Sex Before Marriage, Cilla Black in her eponymous BBC show featuring Dudley Moore , Jimmy Edwards in Whack-o!, a rare interview with Peter Davison about playing Doctor Who, an appearance by future Doctor Who Patrick Troughton from ITV’s early police drama, No Hiding Place plus a significant screen debut from a young Pete Postlethwaite.

However for Nerdly readers, one of the real highlights of this edition of Missing Believed Wiped is the uncovering of TV horror Late Night Horror: The Corpse Can’t Play. Originally broadcast on 3 May, 1968 on BBC2 this is the only...

The Meating Room, a thrilling Scottish noir mystery from T. Frank Muir, one of Britain’s top crime authors, is out now; and when Dread Central was asked to take part in his online blog tour for the book, we jumped… Continue Reading →

The post Guest Post: The Meating Room Author T. Frank Muir on Murder and Other Things in St. Andrews, Scotland appeared first on Dread Central.

When we first heard about The Meating Room, a thrilling Scottish noir mystery from T. Frank Muir, one of Britain’s best crime writers, we weren’t sure how Dread-worthy it might be; but after being assured there are elements of horror… Continue Reading →

The post Grisly Procedural The Meating Room Confronts Readers with a Gory Crime appeared first on Dread Central.

Monty Python’s Terry Jones arrived during a break in the clouds Friday for an Adr session at West La’s The Village, the storied recording studio where the late Robin Williams lent his voice to Jones’ upcoming sci-fi comedy Absolutely Anything shortly before his death this summer.

“One thing we’re grateful to Robin for is he was the first to come on and he stuck with the whole thing,” recalled Jones’ close collaborator Gavin Scott (The Mists of Avalon, Small Soldiers). “The kind of attitude that led him to stick with the project through all its ups and downs, he totally exhibited here. He wanted to make everybody feel good from the engineer to the lady making the coffee. It was very late in the day for him and we didn’t know that, but he was a real mensch.”

Co-scripted over two decades by Jones and Scott,...

Co-writer of TV sitcoms On the Buses and The Rag Trade

At the height of his writing partnership with Ronald Chesney, Ronald Wolfe, who has died aged 89 after a fall, enjoyed huge success with the sitcom On the Buses; its bawdy humour was panned by the critics but lapped up by the viewing public. Originally turned down by the BBC, the idea for a comedy based around the antics of a driver and conductor giving their inspector the runaround at the Luxton Bus Company appealed to Frank Muir, head of entertainment at the newly launched ITV company London Weekend Television.

Reg Varney played Stan Butler, at the wheel of the No 11, and Bob Grant was his lothario conductor, Jack. The pair made life hell for the miserable Inspector Blake (Stephen Lewis). Blakey's "Get that bus out" and "I 'ate you, Butler" were two of the most frequent lines that flowed...

Very few actors can match Richard Briers pound for pound when it comes to TV CVs. The 74-year-old found fame on The Good Life in the 1970s, but there is much more to the mild-mannered Surrey-born star's game than playing the potato picking Tom Good. At the very least, Briers deserves credit as one of the all-time great voiceover performers, leading millions of kids through the hi-jinks of Roobarb and Custard. Frank Muir and Dennis Norden spotted Briers in the '60s (more)...