The television series Callan seemingly came to an end in May 1972 with the transmission of the final part of a three-part story The Richmond File - A Man Like Me. We saw the anti-hero David Callan walk away from his work for the Section, vowing never to return after the death of a KGB agent. Played by the late, great Edward Woodward, Callan's story appeared at the time to have come to a fitting close. Woodward moved on to other films and television shows including a stint as host on the panel game Whodunnit? and the lead in the much cherished cult classic The Wicker Man (1973) as well as highly regarded theatre work such as The Wolf (1973).

But he and creator/writer James Mitchell returned to Callan in further on-screen iterations. Mitchell adapted and expanded both his original 1967 Armchair Theatre pilot A Magnum for Schneider and the 1969 novelisation 'Red File for Callan' for a cinema version, Callan, in 1974. A tough, well directed thriller, released through EMI in the UK, it reunited Woodward with the television series's cast members Russell Hunter as the much loved smelly informant, Lonely and semi-regular Clifford Rose as Section brainwasher-in-chief, Snell. The major roles of Hunter, boss of the Section, and Toby Meres, a younger agent working alongside Callan, were re-cast with Eric Porter as Hunter and Peter Egan as Meres, replacing both Peter Bowles from the pilot and Anthony Valentine from the series proper.  Mitchell also continued Callan's story in a series of novels throughout the 1970s, including Russian Roulette, Death and Bright Water and Smear Job.

Nicolas Roeg entered the film industry as a clapper boy working at Marylebone Studios before carving out a career as one of the best cinematographers in the business having lensed Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Truffaut's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) for John Schlesinger. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) was Nicolas Roeg's third film as director and, together with Walkabout (1971) and Don't Look Now (1973), is perhaps one of his greatest achievements in British cinema of that decade.

It sits at the centre of an incredible outpouring of cinematic creativity that began, and continues to this day, with his co-direction credit with fellow maverick Donald Cammell on Performance (1970) and includes, during the 1980s, a sequence of equally fascinating films in Bad Timing (1980), Eureka (1983) and Insignificance (1985). Although he has not been as prolific in the last two decades, Roeg is recognised as one of the greatest living British directors whose unique visual style critic Steve Rose describes as "unpredictable, fascinating, cryptic" and it marks out his work in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mad Men is perhaps one of the coolest television dramas of the last five years and year-on-year has continued to raise its own standards in television writing and acting. Superlative storytelling, performances and production have garnered the series a bevvy of much deserved awards and much critical praise. Season Four, about to be released in the UK by Lions Gate, is interesting in that its arrival was highly anticipated following creator Matthew Weiner's, at the time, shocking shake-up of the series at the end of the third year.

Continuing to map the inter-personal relationships of New York ad-men and their families in the 1960s, Season Three climaxed with most of the characters finding that the advertising company they were working for, Sterling Cooper, was being bought out by a British agency. At the same time, the enigmatic central character Don Draper (Jon Hamm) came under pressure from his wife Betty, who had finally discovered that she really didn't know the man she married, with Draper having taken on a dead man's identity during the Korean War.

As ever Mad Men continues to reflect the present day even though it is a period piece and as Matthew Weiner recently explained in the New York Times: "My job as an artist is to channel the feelings I have about society right now, these are the things I’m feeling about our isolation, about our ambiguous relationship with materialism, about failure, about our declining self-esteem. About our attitude towards change and technology. These are things I’m feeling every day, that I put into the show." 

S P O I L E R S

There's one very crucial element in Kevin Elyot's adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's Christopher And His Kind that any viewer is going to have to accept if they intend to enjoy this lovely drama. And that's the casting of Matt Smith. Smith filmed this last May, shortly after completing acting duties on his very first series of Doctor Who and, with his debut as the Eleventh Doctor secured, duly basking in the glow of acceptance from critics and fans alike.

Playing Christopher Isherwood, one of the late 20th century's most recognised gay writers, is something of a leap for Smith and admittedly it is initially a struggle to separate the stiff body language and the clipped British tones of Isherwood from the gangly, eccentric Time Lord. It's that unique Smith physicality and that weirdly handsome face that potentially lures you sideways into an alternate world where the good Doctor has adventures in pre-war Berlin and gets it on with some handsome boys. Slash fiction writers will have a field day.

Some might also see this as a cynical attempt by the producers to give Smith's career a serious boost and will question why yet another straight man is playing gay. Christopher And His Kind, like many other gay themed dramas, does raise questions about authenticity in the television and film industry but is not the place to find the answers (and recently the opposite has been true where the media has interrogated gay actors about playing straight) and no one can blame Smith for seeing this role as a career defining opportunity.

BBC Books are very pleased to announce the republication of 6 Classic Doctor Who novels with Chris Achilleos’s stunning classic artwork and a series of new introductions by Neil Gaiman, Charlie Higson, Gareth Roberts, Stephen Baxter, Russell T Davies and Terrance Dicks.

All 6 titles will be published on 7th July at £4.99 each.

Doctor Who and the Daleks
David Whitaker
Introduction by Neil Gaiman

The mysterious Doctor and his granddaughter Susan are joined by unwilling adventurers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright in an epic struggle for survival on an alien planet.

In a vast metal city they discover the survivors of a terrible nuclear war – the Daleks.  Held captive in the deepest levels of the city, can the Doctor and his new companions stop the Daleks’ plan to totally exterminate their mortal enemies, the peace-loving Thals?  More importantly, even if they can escape from the Daleks, will Ian and Barbara ever see their home planet Earth again?

This novel is based on the second Doctor Who story which was originally broadcast from 21 December 1963 – 1 February 1964. Featuring the First Doctor as played by William Hartnell, and his companions Susan, Ian and Barbara. 

S P O I L E R S

BBCHD - 13 March 2011 - 10.00pm

"Rule 1 of Vampire Club. Do not get arrested."

"It's clearly dress-down-Friday."

"C'mon! Me and the boys wanted a fight. There's popcorn! And at half-time I was going to have an Nespresso!"

"Grief and revenge are not things to get drunk on. You wanted wild and biblical and rahhhhhhh! Instead, you just woke up somewhere unfamiliar with your underwear on back to front."

Let's face it, there was an elephant in the room during the latter half of this series's production. And its name was Peter Jackson. When it was announced back in October that Aidan Turner would be joining Martin Freeman in New Zealand for what would likely be an eighteen month to two year production on The Hobbit, I think many of us knew that Toby Whithouse and his team were left with two options. Either kill off John Mitchell or try and accommodate cameo appearances for a prospective fourth series. They decided on the former.

Made by many of the team behind the success of Timeslip (1970-71), Tightrope (1972) was a 13 part spy series set in and around the quiet village of Redlow, its local comprehensive school and a nearby American air base.

The serial was written by Victor Pemberton, a dramatist who gained his reputation on radio, particularly with the Nigel Kneale style science fiction drama The Slide in 1966 in which a parasitic mud engulfs the new town of Redlow (Pemberton clearly has an affinity for places called Redlow) and takes over the minds of its inhabitants. From there Pemberton worked as script editor and writer on Doctor Who, penning Fury from the Deep, regarded as a classic Patrick Troughton tale, in 1968.

Pemberton joined the writing team of ATV's Timeslip in 1971 to complete the run of 26 episodes, writing the final episode of Bruce Stewart's The Year of the Burn Up to dovetail into his own concluding story The Day of the Clone. At the invitation of producer Ruth Boswell, he created Tightrope for ATV and then wrote for Ace of Wands (1970-72), The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972-74) and Within These Walls (1974-78) amongst others.

... stylised mixture of Grange Hill meets James Bond

Joining Pemberton and Boswell on Tightrope were other members of the Timeslip cast and crew including directors Ron Francis and David Foster and actor Spencer Banks. Banks worked quite extensively during the 1970s and went on to appear in a number of television series, plays and films, including Crown Court, Softly Softly: Task Force, The Georgian House, Crossroads and is probably best regarded for his performance in David Rudkin's extraordinary Penda's Fen for Play for Today in 1974. Tightrope also includes a memorable cast co-starring with Banks and he's accompanied by a contingent of British telly stalwarts including John Savident, Sue Holderness, Mike Grady, George Roubicek, Frederick Treves and Patsy Smart.

Based on David Schulner's pilot The Oaks, originally picked up for a potential series by Fox for the 2008/2009 television season, Marchlands is a five-part adaptation for ITV1 of Schulner's story, that ultimately didn't make it to series, and is the first drama to emerge from the production deal between ITV and 20th Century Fox Television.

As in the original U.S. pilot, Marchlands weaves an intriguing narrative across three different generations living in the same eponymous house. At the centre of the story are the traumatic after-effects of the death by drowning of an 8 year-old girl, Alice Bowen and how her seemingly restless spirit reaches out from the past. She attempts to communicate the circumstances of her death in 1968 to the two families that come to live in Marchlands in both 1987 and the present day while her mother Ruth obsesses about the cause of her death and makes a journey back to Marchlands to find the answers.

Stephen Greenhorn's scripts skillfully mesh together the social and cultural ambiances of all three periods where, in less mature hands, the shifting between the decades and the handling of such a large ensemble cast could have descended into confusion and chaos. The distinct periods in the house and the surrounding village are also made palpable by colour schemes, costumes, prop vehicles and interior designs and an alignment of each period with particular seasons of the year.

S P O I L E R S !

BBCHD - 6 March 2011 - 10.00pm

"Once the curtain was drawn and I'd seen the true nature of nature... I realised these nightmare creatures had permitted us to mind the shop."

"Date of birth? Mr. Fuck You."

The penultimate episode opens with a flashback and we are taken back some twenty years to what presumably were the cage fights now spoken of in hushed tones by the vampire fraternity. The ringmaster of this particular carnival arrives to console the winner. The winner is McNair and he's given a state of the nation address by the Herrick we all once knew before George ripped him to shreds and he was reincarnated as 'Uncle Billy'. After describing the "fragile detente" between the human and supernatural worlds, he goes on to pour scorn on the lives of the "semi-detached" and their "Sunday roast with the in-laws... paddling pools and catalogues, five-a-side and Belgian beer". Pausing to consider it, his opinion of this human normality is "God, it sounds horrific!"

Odeon Entertainment continues to unearth some further examples of obscure British cinema with their DVD release this week of Robert Hartford-Davis's The Fiend (AKA Beware My Brethren) which Jonathan Rigby describes as a "spectacularly tawdry psycho-thriller" in his exemplary English Gothic.

Rigby is not far wrong. And yet, The Fiend is peculiarly compulsive viewing.

Hartford-Davis is probably best known for scripting Gerry O'Hara's directorial debut of 1963 That Kind of Girl and directing the pale Hammer imitation that was The Black Torment (1964) for Compton Films. He was also responsible for a rather nasty serial killer shocker Corruption (1968) starring Peter Cushing. The latter was made under the Titan Productions partnership with cinematographer Peter Newbrook. By 1972 and Hartford's work on The Fiend, the partnership had dissolved and Newbrook had already gone on to make The Asphyx.

What makes The Fiend so lurid is that it embraces both the serial-killer formula that was coming to prominence in the horror film genre in the early 1970s and reflects the perceived 'permissiveness' that the era was criticised for. It certainly follows in the footsteps of Peeping Tom (1960) and shares similarities to 10 Rillington Place (1971) while prefiguring the Pete Walker combination of horror and sexploitation that can be found in Frightmare (1974) and the similarly religious themed House of Mortal Sin (1975). Like much of Hartford-Davis's work on Corruption, this film is also a decidedly crude, if not completely bizarre, affair.

BBCHD - 27th February 2011 - 9.00pm

"Oh, shit Annie...you frightened me!" "Well, I'm a ghost. It's my prerogative."

"It's difficult enough to find the right words at a time like this. Why not rely on those of the literary greats like Auden... and Cheryl Cole."

"A werewolf ripped you to pieces. And yet you survived. I need you to tell me how."

"Eurgh. I don't know what's worse. That fact that you're a ghost or that you just used the word 'lover'"

"So, your dad's a ghost. And a pikey."

Writer Lisa McGee returns to the series after last year's episode in which Annie managed to communicate with her mother while working with a stage medium, helping other ghosts with their final messages to loved ones. She continues with the themes of the afterlife and how the bereaved cope with life in Daddy Ghoul. Here, the focus is on George and his estranged relationship with his mum and dad and how the news of his father's death ultimately brings the family back together. Bubbling away underneath the gentle comedy-drama of this plot is the aftermath of Nina's anonymous call to the Box Tunnel Twenty hotline and how this brings policewoman Nancy to the doorstep of Honolulu Heights looking for one John Mitchell.