Lara Pulver Spooks interview

I've just discovered this interview with Lara on a site called cultbox so I thought I would post it here.

Lara Pulver ('Spooks': Series 10) interview

Update, I found another interview: http://www.tvchoicemagazine.co.uk/interviewextra/lara-pulver-spooks

PS I've just realised that this is my 300th post to this blog thing.

Lara Pulver Spooks article in Total TV Guide

Today is "new TV listings mag day" and I was hoping that the Radio Times would have a nice Lara Pulver article for me ahead of Spooks returning on Saturday.

However while the Radio Times and most other mags do have some Spooks content there is very little Lara-specific stuff going on.

Fortunately Total TV Guide (somewhere between the TV Times and Whats On TV in terms of quality) does provide us with a nice full-page photo of Lara looking very lovely indeed...

It would appear that she spends the episode in an evening dress running around with a gun. I can only assume there is yet another embassy siege with her colleagues being held hostage. Sounds good to me.

It is worth noting that all the TV guides are presently having a collective swoon of excitement with the return of Downton Abbey. The TV Times has even produced alternate Downton Abbey covers to collect and be passed on to future generations. The Radio Times has a foldy-out cover to fit in bigger picture of the stars, no doubt worth framing and hanging in the living room.

All well and good, but Spooks and Downton are on at the same time on Sunday. And my DVD Recorder has packed in. I may resort to recording on on good old VHS. Remember that?

Doctor Who 'The Girl Who Waited'

I felt that last week's superlative-laden episode didn't quite live up to it's raised expectations. Then this week I noticed the preview writers were at it again, so I automatically lowered my expectations accordingly. However I'm happy to report that this week's episode is pretty decent and will probably be remembered as one of the more memorable instalments of this series.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are off on holiday, so it appears that any pretense of looking for baby Melody/River has been well an truly jettisoned. When the Tardis materialises on the universe's second most popular holiday destination they are presented, not with glittering colonnades, but a sterile white featureless room. Rory and the Doctor enter another room by pressing a green anchor button. Amy has been lagging behind and presses a red waterfall button instead. She ends up in the same room but there's no Doctor or Rory.

It transpires that there are two time streams, one faster than the other with Amy in the fast stream. The reason given has to do with the planet being under quarantine from a virus that kills you in a day. Uninfected people could live out their lives in the fast stream and still have the company of their infected loved ones who stay in the slower stream. At least thats my interpertation. The Doctor seemed to suggest the opposite and I think that the point was poorly explained.

The Doctor promises to slip over to the fast stream to rescue Amy, however when he arrives he discovers that she has aged 36 years. Oops. She's not the same Amy after being left alone to fend for herself. Rory wants to go back and somehow rescue Amy when she first got trapped so she doesn't have to wait all that time. Understandably the older Amy wants to live and not vanish from existence.

And Doctor tells Rory that he must make a choice.

The old Amy make up is pretty well done and Karen Gillan does a good job playing the same character differently. At the episodes heart is the relationship between Rory and Amy with the doctor actually taking a bit of a back seat. The story doesn't shy away from having what is actually a bit of a downbeat ending. Credit to Arthur Darvill for taking the potential fifth wheel Rory and making him essential to the show.

On another note I quite enjoyed the white rooms which reminded me a little of the empty white space where the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find themselves in The Mind Robber. And I've just realised both stories have mysterious white robots...

Lara Pulver in Spooks info from BBC

The BBC press office has released some info on the upcoming final series of Spooks. Here's the little bit about Lara Pulver's character plus a tiny photo.

In the last ever series of acclaimed spy drama Spooks, the team has been left reeling by Lucas North's betrayal, and with Harry Pearce on gardening leave, Section D has a new leader. Erin Watts is acting head and she has brought Calum Reed with her, a brilliant officer and technical genius.

You can read the complete press release at www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/tv/2011/wk38/images/206_spooks.jpg.

Hopefully the BBC will release a larger photo soon.

Doctor Who 'Night Terrors'

I expected big things from episode 9 as some of the previews/reviews I had read about it were brimming with superlatives. There were suggestions that it was the best episode ever, or scariest episode ever. That immediately made me sit up and take notice. 'Better than Blink? Really? That good? Wow!'

No, it's not better than Blink, but I was silly for thinking it could be.

So we have a Mark Gatiss written stand-alone episode in a series that has pretty much steered clear from stand-alone episodes. Basically a little boy is scared of his bedroom wardrobe. And the little boy turns out to be an alien. And that's about it really apart from stuff where our heroes run around a dolls house and Amy gets turned into a wooden doll. But she gets better I am happy to say.

The guy from Outcasts who reminded me of Danny Dyer is in is as the alien boy's human dad.

Doctor Who 'Lets Kill Hitler'

I managed not to write anything about the first seven spidodes of the current series but I'll hopefully be able to make an effort for the rest of the episodes.

But what an episode to begin with! Let's put it this way, this is not an episode to use as an introduction to the show.

The last episode shown was 'A Good Man Goes to War' where there was a cliffhanger of sorts. Amy's baby had been taken by The Silence to be used as a weapon and we discovered that Melody Pond = River Song so Alex Kingston was actually Amy and Rory's kid.

The new episode kicks off with the introduction of Amy's old childhood friend Mel who we have never met before. In an enterataining sequence we see her being a bit of a trouble-maker at school with young Amelia and Rory. She turns up with a gun and hijacks the Doctor and the Tardis, and forces the Doctor to take her to 1938 Berlin to kill Hitler.

This is where things get a little bit complicated.

Because also in 1938 we meet the miniaturised crew of a human-shaped space ship tha travel through time to punish war criminals. They are here for Hitler but get sidetracked when the Tardis delivers a better catch.

Mel gets shot and STARTS TO REGENERATE! Next thing we know Alex Kington is back.

Mel is Melody is River. 'You named your daughter after your daughter,' the Doctor tells Amy.

This River does not yet call herself River so we've gone right back to her first meeting with the Doctor. Probably.

And now things get complicated. Again. Because Mel/River tries to kill the doctor and ends up poisoning him with her lipstick. But that actually makes sense if we remember that The Silence took her and programmed her to do that.

In the end Mel/River uses up her regenerations to heal the Doctor, although we are reminded that he will get killed in Utah by the Astronaut in the lake.

So overall it was an entertaining episode that answers a few questions about the River Song saga, but obviously raises a few more. I expect it will be worth rewatching when the series is finished in a few weeks time.

Camelot, the once and future series

Last night Channel 4 showed the final episode of Camelot Series 1. Which is also the last episode of Camelot ever, seeing as the second series was canceled.

Given that there is not much on TV during the summer I thought I'd give this a go. At first I was a bit "meh" about it but as the weeks went by I found myself enjoying the show a little more and then one day I realised that I was actually looking forward to the next episode.

The first episode opened with king Uther Pendragon getting poisoned by his shape-shifting daughter Morgan, played wonderfully by Eva Green, who thinks getting her hands on the crown is a done deal.

But Morgan didn't figure on Merlin (played by Joe Fiennes) coming up with a secret Pendragon offspring called Arthur. In the best Star Wars/Harry Potter tradition the infant Arthur had been spirited away to be brought up in secret and in safety by Sean Pertwee.

Merlin installs Arthur in the ruined castle of Camelot while Morgan glowers and plots from Castle Pendragon.

As this production comes from the people that gave us The Tudors you can be sure of the requisite amount of naughty bits, especially when Arthur and Guinevere head down to the beach for some quality time in the sand.

And this is a neat twist on the King Arthur legend which has Arthur being betrayed when his wife Guinevere hooks up with Lancelot. In this version it's Arthur doing the betraying as Guinevere is to wed Leonties who by all accounts is your trademarked Decent Chap.

I found the last few episodes particularly gripping. At one point Morgan captures Arthur's mother Igraine and shape-shifts to look like her so she can go plant some discord in Camelot. Claire Forlani did a great job playing Morgan pretending to be Igraine, even getting a little Eva Green inflection in her voice.

She lets slip to Leonties that Guinevere and Arthur were doing the naughty stuff and that manages to cause a lot of tension among Arthur and his knights as they go off to defend Bardon Pass from some bad men that Morgan sent to attack the fort.

And what of Arthur himself? Jamie Campbell Bower has been the recipient of a lot of criticism, mainly to the effect that he's "just not right for the part". But I think that's the whole point. We're seeing Arthur start from being a young guy who has grown up without much of a care in the world. He's told he has to be king and has to grow up fast.

There was a noticable transformation in Arthur in the last couple of episodes when he sent his men away from Bardon Pass while he stayed behind to single-handedly defend the fort out of guilt. I think if we had seen seasons two, three and four we would have seen more of a transformation.

But overall I'll miss Eva Green's Morgan the most, constantly scheming how to get the people to love her more than Arthur, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to get her way.