I was saddened to learn of the recent passing of the influential album cover designer Storm Thorgenson, with whom I spoke in 2005 during a short transatlantic phone call.

Ultimately unsuccessful in my quest to land him as a keynote speaker of a media...

Hit & Miss, the miniseries that played on Sky last year in the UK and on DirecTV in the US, hit North American DVD this week, thanks to the Canadian label BFS Entertainment.

The six-part drama's main protagonist is a transgender Irish hitwoman named Mia, played by...

A friend recently mentioned that one of his now-grown daughters was named 'Sidney' after Sid Vicious. I immediately chimed in that I once was in an elevator with Sid while I was covering his murder trial on 21 November, 1978 for a long-gone fanzine called Imagine. Out on bail, he...

I am happy to report that the fundraising campaign to get everyone's favourite London cabdriver, Tony Walker, to New York to attend the premiere of 56Up was a success.

As in the UK, the film has received universally rave reviews from US critics.

Walker appeared...

The Up series is a British telly institution that endures 56 years after it debuted on Granada in 1964.

Every seven years, award-winning director Michael Apted goes back to interview on camera the same group of individuals when they were seven years old. Oh my, have they all grown.

It might very well require the services of Sherlock Holmes.

While visiting London in early November, EastEnders enthusiast and New Yorker Cary Portway stumbled upon a poster on a street lamp dubbed 'Rotten Cotton', adorned with a photo of Albert Square icons, son and...

Writing this on the morning of Thanksgiving is especially appropriate, coming on the heels of last night watching two excellent episodes of EastEnders on public television in the US, which is about eight years behind the storyline you lot see in the UK. Yes, I'm in a time-warp.

Despite being...

So what exactly did Mick Jagger mean when he first sang in 1965 "What a drag it is getting old" in Mother's Little Helper. More like Grand Dad's Walker.

But how many of the geriatric set pushing 70 can still do what they do? With four sold-out shows in Newark...

It's not yet a household name like Sundance or Tribeca, but the Gold Coast Film Festival, bringing the best of cinema to the geographic ritzy section of Long Island, NY celebrated in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, is gaining momentum for the cineaste set.

This year the festival's main...

Sally Potter was 13 years old when the Cuban Missile Crisis was going on in 1962. Apparently it made a deep impression on the teenager growing up in England.

Fifty years later, she used as a backdrop of her new film the threat of a nuclear war between the...

It's hard to fathom the British film industry.

A fairly disappointing big-screen version of The Inbetweeners, a great telly comedy for three series about four misfit high school mates will do boffo domestic box office (record-setting for a British comedy), but the indie works of art that get screened at...

A tune-up, unplugged gig, this one was, leading up to the penultimate Royal Albert Hall capper this 1 November.

The three-piece version of Karl Wallinger's World Party that played New York's quaint City Winery on 17 September no doubt will pale in comparison in about six weeks to the wall...

EastEnders fans apparently have been misled believing that EastEnders was Princess Diana's favourite TV programme.

No, that honour instead went to another Brit soap, Brookside, Paul Burrell, former royal butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, tells Huffington Post UK and the Walford Gazette in an exclusive interview.

...

Original EastEnders castmember Anna Wing, MBE, the original matriarch of the Beale family,
was brought out of retirement to play an East End gangland boss in a music video going viral by the funk band called Quarrel.

You can see the video on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbKk44PlxAU&feature=youtu.be

Quarrel...

Why is it that all this Union Jack-waving during the Queen's Diamond Jubilee doesn't mean squat at the British cinema box office?

The British Film Institute reported on 31 January that the market share in 2011 for all British films at the UK box office, including both independents and those...

In the new film version of Dark Shadows, Johnny Depp, playing vampire Barnabas Collins, emerges from the coffin in 1972. The Dark Shadows TV series, sort of an afternoon gothic soap designed to appeal to hip kids, ran on American television from 1966-1971. Like the Austin Powers trilogy send-up of...

Actress Carey Mulligan married musician Marcus Mumford (of Mumford & Sons) last weekend at a farm in Somerset, England.

Two hundred guests attended the rustic celebration, including Colin Firth, rumoured to being cast as Henry Higgins to Mulligan's also-not-yet-confirmed Eliza Doolittle in the oft-delayed remake of...

The Rolling Stones' Hot Rocks 1964-1971 was the first record - a double gatefold album - I ever bought, back in 1972 when I was 14, unleashing an obsession with recorded music that remains more than 40 years later.

I thought of me forking over my saved-up allowance money to...

The new Welsh film Hunky Dory, which premiered last night in London, doesn't exactly tackle unchartered cinematic territory. Didn't Sidney Poitier back in 1967 in To Sir, With Love cover the idealistic high school teacher seeking to set working-class youths in the right direction upon their graduation? American contributions to...

Anyone who saw The Iron Lady was not surprised by Meryl Streep's Best Actress Oscar win. Virtually a female Zelig, Streep morphed herself into the former British prime minister, capturing the politician's every mannerism.

Two for two in its nominations to wins (Best Makeup was the other), The Iron Lady...