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I’m writing a letter to Richard Curtis on behalf of Frances de la Tour. Release the director’s cut of Love Actually – for the sake of the nation. The silken-voiced Harry Potter and Seventies sitcom star was originally among the crème de la crème British thesps starring in the 2003 film, playing Anne Reid’s dying, bed-ridden partner – but both actors ended up on the cutting room floor. “Oh yes, we had a lovely scene,” she says. “And I think it was the only gay scene,” she remembers. “It’s odd that they cut it. Maybe it was too dark to bring into it. Because it ended up being quite a light and fluffy film, didn’t it?” It could have made the affectionately derided Christmas film into something quite different – more progressive, less cloyingly twee. But, still, Curtis has manners. “At least he wrote to me and said we...

I’m writing a letter to Richard Curtis on behalf of Frances de la Tour. Release the director’s cut of Love Actually – for the sake of the nation. The silken-voiced Harry Potter and Seventies sitcom star was originally among the crème de la crème British thesps starring in the 2003 film, playing Anne Reid’s dying, bed-ridden partner – but both actors ended up on the cutting room floor. “Oh yes, we had a lovely scene,” she says. “And I think it was the only gay scene,” she remembers. “It’s odd that they cut it. Maybe it was too dark to bring into it. Because it ended up being quite a light and fluffy film, didn’t it?” It could have made the affectionately derided Christmas film into something quite different – more progressive, less cloyingly twee. But, still, Curtis has manners. “At least he wrote to me and said we...

British veteran comedy actress Josephine Tewson, who found her biggest success in her sixties starring in one of the 1990s’ biggest TV sitcoms, has died aged 91.

Tewson was best known for playing Elizabeth, the living-on-her-nerves neighbour of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, from 1990 to 1995.

But she appeared in a string of other shows too, such as Shelley with Hywel Bennet and No Appointment Necessary with Roy Kinnear. Following the success of Keeping Up Appearances, the show’s writer Roy Clarke gave Tewson the role of Miss Davenport in Last of the Summer Wine, which she played from 2003 to 2010.

In a statement, her agent Jean Diamond said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Josephine Tewson.”

The actress died on Thursday at Denville Hall, a care home for actors and other members of the entertainment industry in north London.

Several decades before she enjoyed sitcom stardom,...

Beloved British actor Peter Bowles, who starred in BBC sitcom To The Manor Born, has died aged 85, his agent has confirmed.

In a statement to the BBC, Bowles’ agent said he had “sadly passed away from cancer.” He is survived by wife Susan Bennett and three children Guy, Adam and Sasha.

“Starting his career at the Old Vic Theatre in 1956, he starred in 45 theatrical productions ending at the age of 81 in The Exorcist at the Phoenix Theatre,” said the statement, reflecting on an incredible and lengthy career.

“He worked consistently on stage and screen, becoming a household name on TV as the archetypal English gent in To The Manor Born, Only When I Laugh, The Bounder and Lytton’s Diary, which he devised himself.”

Born in 1936, Bowles’ career began in theater for several years before he featured in an episode of Rising Damp.

He became recognized as a comic actor...

Exclusive: My5, the streaming service run by ViacomCBS’s UK network Channel 5, has acquired British comedy series Hapless, which first started life as a self-released project on Amazon Prime Video.

The six-part series was created, written, and produced by Gary Sinyor and stars Outlander and Paddington actor Tim Downie as Paul Green, a journalist on the UK’s fourth most successful Jewish newspaper.

The series first launched on Amazon last year under the title The Jewish Enquirer, but with industry production slowing down during the coronavirus pandemic, Sinyor saw an opportunity to pitch the show to a broadcaster. It goes live on My5 in March

Hapless co-stars Geoffrey McGivern (Little Dorrit) and Lucy Montgomery (Tracey Ullman’s Show) as Green’s father and sister, while Josh Howie (Call Me Alvy) features as the journalist’s best friend. Sinyor himself provides the voice of Green’s narrow-minded editor.

Here’s...

‘When somebody decides to call a character Brock Blennerhassett,’ says Michael Smiley, ‘you think, well, that hasn’t just come off the top of your head, there must be something going on there!’ What’s going on with Blennerhassett, his lead role in new darkly comic Victorian drama Dead Still, is strange, timely and layered, says Smiley.

Dead Still, available in the UK now to stream on Acorn TV, is ‘a dark, funny, proper period drama set in Dublin in Victorian times’ Smiley explains. His character Blennerhassett is part of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry who’s broken away to work in the experimental field of memorial photography, taking pictures of posed corpses for bereaved families. ‘That was a big thing in Victorian times because of the British Empire being in mourning after Prince Albert died.’

The series blends a murder mystery with gallows humour and colonial Irish politics. ‘All of...

Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann Khurrana star in Shoojit Sircar’s puzzling tale of class and property management

The first big Indian release of 2020 to divert towards streaming is an offbeam, strangely mismanaged parable about property management that renders its stars all but unrecognisable. The established Amitabh Bachchan is buried beneath old-age latex and thick-lensed glasses; emergent pin-up Ayushmann Khurrana is weighed down by a (presumably prosthetic) middle-aged spread. However director Shoojit Sircar’s gaze keeps drifting beyond them, to a location you couldn’t make-under: a mildewing Lucknow mansion house, lorded over by Bachchan’s shuffling miser Mirza, ever looking for ways to kick Khurrana’s collected waifs-and-strays to the kerb. The curious, altogether tentative drama that ensues may be as close as any film-maker has come to signing off on a Hindi redo of TV’s Rising Damp.

Alas, it’s also one of those cases where forced idiosyncrasy...

Exclusive: ITV is remaking Belgian crime drama Professor T, starring Johnny English’s Ben Miller and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’s Frances de la Tour.

The series is produced by Eagle Eye Drama, the production company set up by the founders of foreign language streaming service Walter Presents, and the order marks its first original drama commission.

Based on the hit Belgian series of the same name, Professor T is set against the backdrop of Cambridge University, one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions.

Miller, who also starred in BBC crime drama Death in Paradise, plays the genius Ocd criminologist, Professor Jasper Tempest, while de la Tour, the Tony-winning actress who starred in The History Boys stage show in London and Broadway as well as classic British sitcom Rising Damp, stars as his colourful but overbearing mother, Adelaide.

Emerging star Emma Naomi, who appeared in...

Kate Beckinsale is remembering her father, the late actor Richard Beckinsale, in a sweet Father’s Day tribute.

On Sunday, Kate, 45, shared a black-and-white photo of herself when she was a child alongside her father, who died in 1979 at the age of 31 from a massive heart attack when Kate was 5.

“There has never been anyone like you . Happy Father’s Day...

Christian Slater Mr Robot, True Romance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Robert Glenister Hustle, Spooks, Kris Marshall Death in Paradise, Love Actually, My Family, Stanley Townsend Girl from the North Country, The Nether and Don Warrington Death in Paradise, Rising Damp, are the 'deal chasing' cut-throat sales team in David Mamet's masterpiece, Glengarry Glen Ross, alongside Daniel Ryan as Lingk Linda Green, Posh and Oliver Ryan as Baylen Dr Faustus, As You Like It. This trailblazing modern classic, directed by Sam Yates, runs at the Playhouse Theatre now through 3 February 2018, and BroadwayWorld has a first look at the cast in action below...

Christian Slater Mr Robot, True Romance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Robert Glenister Hustle, Spooks, Kris Marshall Death in Paradise, Love Actually, My Family, Stanley Townsend Girl from the North Country, The Nether and Don Warrington Death in Paradise, Rising Damp, are the 'deal chasing' cut-throat sales team in David Mamet's masterpiece, Glengarry Glen Ross, alongside Daniel Ryan as Lingk Linda Green, Posh and Oliver Ryan as Baylen Dr Faustus, As You Like It.

The health service is an election battleground, but on screen it has long united the nation through film and television’s ongoing love affair with the NHS

Britannia Hospital was not a hit. Released in 1982, the film was a grand slab of British oddity from director Lindsay Anderson, arriving after the boarding school revolt of If … and business-land romp O Lucky Man. The lead was the great comic actor Leonard Rossiter, star of TV’s Rising Damp, cast as the administrator of a chaotic NHS hospital preparing for a visit from royalty.

It’s a movie that feels like a panic attack – the staff mutiny at creeping privatisation, strange experiments take place behind closed doors. Often it seems about to implode as you watch, leaving just a cloud of strange-smelling smoke – but then, it is supposed to be a portrait of collapse. As per the title, the idea was that...

The actor, currently cameoing in Mr Holmes, may be best known for sitcoms, but she’s also featured in an eclectic selection of big-screen work

Frances de la Tour is not famous for film. The public still mostly recognise her for Rising Damp; critical recognition has come, in the main, from her stage work (three Oliviers, one Tony).

And yet De la Tour has also made movies: an eclectic selection featuring collaborations with Martin Scorsese, the Wombles and Denzel Washington. Sometimes she’s seen only fleetingly – the briefest of fee-fi-fo-fums in last year’s Into the Woods, and just one appearance opposite Vicious housemate Ian McKellen in this week’s Mr Holmes. Sometimes we never even see the scenes: her role as a headmistress having an affair with Anne Reid in Love Actually was left on the cutting-room floor.

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A satisfying reinvigoration of Tove Jansson’s children’s classic has John Patterson reminiscing about his childhood, and an early classroom crush

Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll was the first book that made me want to read on my own. In 1971, I was seven and my form teacher at All Saints Primary School, Miss Jones, would read it to the class at the end of each school day. I was enraptured by it all: Moomin Valley, Moomintroll and Sniff, Snufkin and his pipe and mouth organ, the cantankerous botanist called the Hemulen, the Hobgoblin’s magical hat, and what happened when the Muskrat absent-mindedly dropped his false teeth into it.

I loved Miss Jones. She was youngish with big henna’d hair, wore black zip-up knee boots and a flashy leather raincoat, and zipped around in a little convertible Mg looking like Tara King, the forgotten Avengers girl between Mrs Peel and Purdey.

Kate Beckinsale has unveiled a plaque for her father.

The blue plaque went up at College House Junior School in Chilwell, Nottinghamshire for the late actor Richard Beckinsale, who was a student there.

The actor was best known for his starring roles in Porridge and Rising Damp.

Beckinsale died in 1979 at the age of 31 from a heart attack.

His daughter's ex-partner Michael Sheen and comedian David Walliams made an unexpected appearance with Beckinsale at the event.

The actress was most recently seen in the 2012 remake of Total Recall.

She will next be seen starring in Eliza Graves and The Trials of Cate McCall.

You probably know by now that I am avowed Anglophile. I have been since I was a young girl falling in love with the young men who made British music in the 1960s. Ah, Peter Noone, Jeremy Clyde, Ringo Starr, and yes, even Freddie (looked like the quintessential nerd) Garrity! If you know all of those names, good on you. If not, run to Google. I wrote my senior theme in high school on "England as it is Today." Because we didn.t have access to British television shows when I was growing up, it wasn.t till the PBS stations started showing "Monty Python" and "Doctor Who" in the early 1970s that I knew of the wonders of programmes from across the pond. Notice my British spelling of .programs.? I bet you did. By the 1980s, I.d found "Rising Damp," "The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin" ...

Sir Ian McKellen has revealed that the comedy in his new show about a gay couple comes from the characters themselves rather than from their sexuality.

The actor said that while past sitcoms have made fun of gay characters, the men in Vicious are funny in their own right and "just happen to be gay".

The 73-year-old - who stars alongside Sir Derek Jacobi in the upcoming ITV series as ageing partners who have lived together for almost 50 years - is glad that TV has advanced in this way.

"For me, it is as if TV has grown up," he told The Sun.

"In the past, gay characters in sitcoms have been figures of fun. They were funny because they were gay. But I like the fact that these characters are funny because of the people they are. That's a real advance."

He also said that the programme is a...

Classic ITV sitcom Rising Damp is to return as a stage play.

The original comedy series starred Leonard Rossiter as troublesome landlord Rigsby and aired on ITV between 1974 and 1978.

Don Warrington - who played the cultured Philip Smith in the sitcom - will direct the new stage adaptation from the Comedy Theatre Company.

The UK tour will launch in Blackpool at the Grand Theatre on Tuesday, May 14 before moving on to Darlington, Salford, Malvern, Norwich, Sheffield, Woking, Bradford and finally Richmond - wrapping up on July 20.

The play's cast includes Stephen Chapman (Rigsby), Paul Morse (Alan), Cornelis Macarthy (Philip) and Amanda Hadingue (Miss Jones).

The Rising Damp TV series was itself based on a stage play - writer Eric Chappell's 1971 work The Banana Box.

Spooks was a great TV series that ran for a decade – what more is there to tell? This trend for turning TV shows into movies needs to stop

The world needs a Spooks movie like it needs to be mauled by a bear, but that won't necessarily stop one from happening. According to Peter Firth, who played MI5 boss Harry Pearce, the writers of Spooks the TV series now have a script in the works for Spooks the film. "They should make it," Firth told The Huffington Post. "It's not like it's a gamble with this one. But it costs a lot, and there's not a lot of money to go round at the moment."

Here's another idea: they shouldn't make it. Spooks had a decade-long run on television. It had 86 hours to tell its story, and it did it very well. The ending, when it finally came in 2011, felt timely and satisfying and conclusive.

British comedy may not be in quite as healthy a position as it used to be, but for good reason classic shows like Fawlty Towers, Only Fools & Horses and Rising Damp are still counted as among the best British TV products of all time, while relatively newer shows like The Inbetweeners, The Office and Shameless have inspired Us spin-offs. The success of the shows relies on the strength of their writing and even more so the appeal of their characters – they are the charismatic anchors who inspire audiences to return, with eminently quotable catch-phrases and immediately recognisable quirks.

As a lifelong lover of British comedy, I’ve created a list of 50 characters (no more than one per show) representing what I feel to be the best of the genre. So without further ado, I present in alphabetical order The 50 Greatest Fictional UK TV Comedy Characters of All Time.

1. Sir Humphrey Appleby – Yes,...

Ian McKellen

N Conrad

Two of Britain’s most beloved knights – Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen – are set to join forces for an ITV sitcom that will debut next year. In Vicious, the duo will play an aging gay couple who divide their time between bickering and reading books.

Freddie (McKellen) was a talented young actor when he met bartender Stuart (Jacobi) but 50 years later the careers of both men are all but over and the humor centers around their efforts to keep themselves entertained. Rising Damp’s Frances De La Tour will feature prominently in the series as the duo’s closest friend – Violet. She also likes to argue but her devilish sense of humor keeps the duo amused. If the premise sounds somewhat familiar then it’s probably because the producer is Gary Janetti whose previous hits include the NBC sitcom Will and Grace.

Click here...

Leonard Rossiter has become the latest TV star to be accused of sexual abuse while at the BBC. The Rising Damp actor appeared in many BBC productions in his career, including his iconic role as Reggie Perrin in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, before his death at the age of 57 in 1984. The Sun reports that a man has alleged he was the victim of a sexual assault on the set of the Rossiter-starring TV play The Year of the Sex Olympics, while working on the production as an extra at the age of 18. The accuser claimed that Rossiter was present for the attack and that he arrived after being "tipped off" that it was taking place. He was then alleged to have "watched with glee". The man said that he attempted to report the abuse to a senior BBC figure working on the play but was ignored, (more...

John Clive, who appeared in films including A Clockwork Orange, the Pink Panther and the Italian Job, has died at the age of 79.

The actor and author, who was also the voice of John Lennon in Yellow Submarine and went on to become an international bestselling author, passed away following a short illness, his family said on Monday.

For many, his most memorable turn was appearing alongside Michael Caine in the original 1969 version of the Italian Job in a scene said to have been ad-libbed by the pair.

Clive, playing the manager of a garage that has been looking after a sportscar belonging to Charlie Croker (Caine) while he has been serving a jail sentence, names the final bill as £200. Croker, who tells him that his absence has...

You may find the new Ben Stiller movie The Watch strangely familiar. But that's not necessarily a good thing

You might be forgiven for thinking that you've seen The Watch before. Not because Ben Stiller's character is the same uptight blowhard that he has played in everything for the past 15 years, or because Richard Ayoade is basically just Moss from The It Crowd again, or because Vince Vaughn remains content to sit back and bibble out the same directionless patter that has been his stock in trade for what seems like centuries.

No. The reason is because, once you've scraped away all the sex jokes and clanging Costco product placement, you're basically left with Dad's Army. Both are essentially stories about a group of ill-prepared middle-aged incompetents trying to escape the monotony of their day-to-day lives by fudging together a defence against an enemy they don't fully understand. With The Watch,...

Here’s a game. Who wrote the classic British sitcom The Office? And who wrote the classic American sitcom Friends?

Answers at the end please. Now let us begin.

Cup of tea. Check. Raining outside. A lot. Check. Feet up. Check. ‘Insert pet’ fed. Check. Put on the tele to watch something before you start your homework/drinking/both. Check.

What is on? Check now. How often can you put on the television and stumble across the middle of an episode of The Office, and just watch on until the end? Rarely. What about good old-fashioned British comedy like Rising Damp or Dad’s Army? Never. But what about Friends? Or Glee? Or The Big Bang Theory? Or How I Met Your Mother? Always. The difference? American.

From the outset I am a huge comedy fan of work from both sides of the Atlantic. I was brought up on Monty Python and Blazing Saddles.

The movie of the sitcom is always an accident waiting to happen. I have a soft spot for the big-screen version of Rising Damp, but I'd prefer to keep it quiet. The reason for the genre's persistence might be the legendary box-office performance of On the Buses, the biggest UK cinema hit of 1971, proving that you can turn out any old guff if your sitcom already has an established fanbase. (Or maybe that was just the way things were in 1971).

A hoard of lost TV dramas – starring the likes of Sean Connery, Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi – have resurfaced. What do they say about TV then and now?

We have become used to the idea of major TV dramas being imported from America: series such as The Wire, The Sopranos and The West Wing. But a stash of programmes heading for Britain this month have a more complicated history. These are not strictly imports; rather, they are being returned to their country of origin.

The 65 plays – starring actors such as Sean Connery, Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi – were transmitted by the BBC and ITV between 1957 and 1969, but were only seen once. Subsequently, if they were asked after by historians or biographers, they were found to be missing, presumed wiped, a frequent fate in a period when the preservation of TV programmes was an expensive business. However, during a recent stock-taking...

Shaun of the Dead was good, Sex Lives of the Potato Men was bad. So how do you avoid a Britcom disaster?

Anywhere else, it would be a cause for celebration. Later this month, a debut feature is to be released by the director of one of Britain's most popular TV comedies. Bafta-nominated for his work on BBC2's The Mighty Boosh, Paul King is also an award-winning live comedy director – and his new film Bunny and the Bull was selected for both the Toronto and London film festivals. Here, then, is a cheering tale of a home-grown talent making his way in cinema, right? If only it were that simple. "There's a pack mentality with British comic films to go, 'What a heap of shit!'" says King. "Your worst nightmare is, 'Oh God, I just hope my film's not one of those …'"

One of those? Does he...

Year: 2009

Directors: Paul King

Writers: Paul King

IMDb: link

Trailer: link

Review by: Ben Austwick

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

British television comedy hasn't got a great track record when it comes to graduating to the film theatre, and some of the best shows – Rising Damp, Bottom, The League of Gentlemen – have translated into truly awful films. When Edgar Wright made Shaun of the Dead he took a different approach to his predecessors, using only a handful of elements from his sitcom Spaced to build new characters, setting and story. Paul King has done the same with Bunny and the Bull, which while no-where near as good as Wright's zombie comedy classic is still a lot better than we've come to expect from the usual tawdry journey from small to big screen.

Paul King directs The Mighty Boosh, which when it first aired in 2004 was a welcome breath of fresh air in...

Kate Beckinsale's childhood dreams of becoming a big sister were ruined by her father's untimely death. Richard Beckinsale, beloved star of classic U.K. TV sitcoms Porridge and Rising Damp, died from a heart attack in 1979, when his daughter was just five-years-old.

And now the actress has revealed her parents were planning on having another child together just before her dad passed away, aged just 31.

And the star is proud of the fact she was the reason her actress mum Judy Loe wanted more kids.

The Underworld star, who has a half-sister, called Samantha from her father's first marriage to Margaret Bradley, tells Hollywood Life magazine, "I used to pester my mother for another baby when my father was still alive. She ended up having an eight-hour operation to unblock her tubes and things like that.

"The operation was a success, but my father died while she was having it, so it was really ironic, terrible timing."

The actress, who is a mum to nine-year-old Lily, admits she'd rethink her plans about having more kids if her daughter asked for a sibling.

She adds, "If Lily was begging me for a brother or sister I'd be more inclined (to have another)."

Lily's father is Beckinsale's ex Michael Sheen. The actress is currently married to moviemaker Len Wiseman.

The actress' daughter turns 10 on Saturday.

On this week's Strictly Come Dancing, Heather Small and Don Warrington ended up being voted into bottom two. The Rising Damp actor was criticised by judge Craig Revel Horwood for using "funky gesticulations" during his American Smooth and after the dance-off, Bruno, Arlene and Craig all decided Don should be the one to leave. We gave the laid-back thespian a call to find out how he enjoyed his time on the show. Hi Don. How are you feeling about your departure?

"I'm doing alright. I'm actually missing the training and the routine of it all, but it's the nature of the beast. I think I acquitted myself fairly well in last week's dance and I just leave the rest up to the judges really." What did you make of the judges' criticisms of your first dance?

"I think they missed the point. I think Bruno was talking (more)...

Don Warrington has said that he respects the judges' decision to eliminate him from Strictly Come Dancing. The Rising Damp star was voted off the show after being voted into the bottom two alongside Heather Small. He then competed in the dance-off but did not win favour with the judges. Warrington said that he has no qualms with their choice to let him go. "It was the (more)...