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Review 2 Entertain Video / Brass - Complete First Series [1983]
Actors & Directors
  • Gareth Jones
  • Les Chatfield
  • Stephen Bill
Release date: 2000-09-25
Run time: 323 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £19.55

Review Brass - Complete First Series [1983] / 2 Entertain Video:


Review Granada Media / The Royle Family - The Complete Series 2 [1998]
Actors & Directors
  • Steve Bendelack
  • Caroline Aherne
Release date: 2000-11-06
Run time: 175 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £4.99

Review The Royle Family - The Complete Series 2 [1998] / Granada Media:

On paper, The Royle Family doesn't sound that promising: a working-class family from Manchester sit in their cluttered living room, watch the telly and argue over domestic details (the arrival of a telephone bill, for instance, provides the big dramatic event of the first episode, which aired in September 1998). But from such small everyday incidents, Royle Family creators Caroline Aherne and Dave Best (who play young couple Denise and Dave) have crafted one of the most successful shows on British television: a comedy about the joys and frustrations of family life that's warm, honest and very, very funny-Britain's answer to The Simpsons, whose success the show rivalled when it started broadcasting on BBC2 (the programme jumped channels to BBC1 for its second series). The Royle Family marked an on-screen reunion for Brookside-actors Ricky Tomlinson (who plays bearded, big-hearted, banjo-playing Jim Royle) and Sue Johnston as his wife Barbara, the driving force behind the Royle household. It is smart casting because The Royle Family is as much a soap opera as a situation comedy. Now in its third series, The Royle Family has seen its characters develop like real folk. Denise and Dave got married and now have a little sprog; Barbara starts menopause (how many sitcoms are brave enough to use that for laughs?) and Denise's kid brother Anthony shakes off his surly adolescence when he turned 18 in series two. Unlike Oasis, who provide the shows theme song "Halfway Round the World", this programme just keeps getting better. But no soap-not even Brookside in its dafter moments-has one-liners as brilliantly crafted as The Royle Family. (The scripts from the series are available to buy. ) Slouched in his armchair, Jim's dour running commentary on the TV shows that are on at the time are particularly priceless: Changing Rooms, for instance, boils down to "a Cockney knocking nails into plywood. [+]
Is this what its come to?" Not quite: because as long as the Royle Family are around, there is something worthwhile to watch. -Edward Lawrenson.

Review 2 Entertain Video / Kevin Turvey - The Man Behind The Green Door [1982]
Actors & Directors
  • Gwyneth Guthrie
  • Adrian Edmondson
  • Robbie Coltrane
  • Roger Sloman
  • Rik Mayall
Release date: 1996-06-03
Run time: 40 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £9.99

Review Kevin Turvey - The Man Behind The Green Door [1982] / 2 Entertain Video:


Review Warner Home Video / Friends - Series 1 - Episodes 1-4 [1995]
Actors & Directors
  • James Burrows
  • Jennifer Aniston
  • Lisa Kudrow
  • Courteney Cox
  • Matt Le Blanc
  • Matthew Perry
Release date: 2003-10-27
Run time: 88 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £1.26

Review Friends - Series 1 - Episodes 1-4 [1995] / Warner Home Video:

Season 1: When the first series of Friends debuted in September 1994, it was immediately obvious there would be no need for the show to find its feet. "The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate" was a confident introduction to the six lead characters, opening in the middle of an everyday conversation with the soon-to-be uncharacteristic line: "There's nothing to tell". In fact, the soap opera-style plot got complicated pretty quickly, with spoiled brat Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) moving on from her failed wedding to feelings toward nerdy/heartthrob Ross (David Schwimmer). However, no love life was more complicated than Joey's (Matt LeBlanc), with an endless stream of girlfriends that annoyed the hell out of wisecracking roommate Chandler (Matthew Perry), who only seemed to be able to connect with Janice (Maggie Wheeler), the shrillest voice in the city. Bouncing all manner of neuroses around them were Ross' obsessive sister Monica (Courteney Cox) and endearingly ditzy Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow). Premise established, Series 1 matured the characters by providing a monkey and a son for Ross. We met also meet Ross and Monica's parents Jack (Elliott Gould) and Judy (Christina Pickles), Chandler's mother (Morgan Fairchild) and Phoebe's twin sister Ursula (Kudrow, naturally). Fans loved cameos from George Clooney, Jay Leno and show creators Kevin Bright, Marta Kauffman and David Crane. But really the focus was on building to "T. O. [+]
W. Rachel Finds Out" that Ross is in love with her. -Paul Tonks.

Review Vision Video Ltd. / Laurel And Hardy - Be Big / Laughing Gravy [1931]
Actors & Directors
  • Harry Bernard
  • Oliver Hardy
  • Laughing Gravy
  • James W. Horne
  • Charlie Hall
  • Stan Laurel
Release date: 1998-04-06
Run time: 57 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £15.99

Review Laurel And Hardy - Be Big / Laughing Gravy [1931] / Vision Video Ltd.:


Review Warner Home Video / Brazil (1985)
Actors & Directors
  • Terry Gilliam
  • Ian Holm
  • Jonathan Pryce
  • Bob Hoskins
  • Katherine Helmond
  • Robert De Niro
Release date: 1997-04-14
Run time: 137 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £0.38

Review Brazil (1985) / Warner Home Video:

If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director-oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus-this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself-until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. -Jim Emerson.

Review Touchstone Home Video / Nothing To Lose [1997]
Actors & Directors
  • Martin Lawrence
  • Kelly Preston
  • Tim Robbins
  • Giancarlo Esposito
  • Steve Oedekerk
  • John McGinley
Release date: 1998-09-21
Run time: 88 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £5.50

Review Nothing To Lose [1997] / Touchstone Home Video:

With a story that's too flimsy to support its running time, this road-mo vie comedy has plenty of problems, but at its best it's a surprisingly inspired vehicle for the clever teaming of Tim Robbins and Martin Lawrence. Robbins plays an addled advertising executive who comes home early one day and discovers his wife in bed with his boss. To make matters worse, he's later carjacked by a struggling, unemployed family-man-turned-petty-thief (Lawrence), and that's when he loses his cool completely. He takes the carjacker hostage and recruits him on a road-trip scheme of revenge against his wife and boss. Plotting to break into his boss' high-security vault, Robbins gets a criminal assist from Lawrence, but they're also on the run from another pair of would-be thieves who trail them to the vault's location. The routine plot of Nothing To Lose is occasionally limp and sluggish, but writer-director Steve Oedekerk (who makes a wacky cameo appearance as a security guard) mines comedy gold during several scenes that detour from the plot for the sake of sheer lunacy. Robbins and Lawrence have great comedic chemistry (if you can tolerate Lawrence's constant profanity), and although the movie ends on a false note with some unlikely turns of fate, it's definitely good for more than a few solid laughs. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

Review Gainsborough VC3532 / The Huggetts Abroad
Actors & Directors
  • Kathleen Harrison
  • Susan Shaw
  • Ken Annakin
  • Dinah Sheridan
  • Jack Warner
  • Petula Clark
Run time: 83 min.
Price: £9.99

Review The Huggetts Abroad / Gainsborough VC3532:

Things are gloomy for the Huggetts in the rainy suburbs of Strutham. Mother is queue weary, father is jobless and their eldest daughter and son-in-law are unable to get to South Africa where Jimmy has a job waiting. The Huggetts have had enough and decide to go to South Africa by car. A mechanical breakdown is not enough to put them off, neither are diamond smugglers, a broken compass in the Sahara or a spell in prison. Will they ever reach their destination?.

Review Dd Home Entertainment / Jackie Mason - A Night At The Opera
Actors & Directors
  • Jackie Mason
Release date: 2003-10-27
Run time: 95 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £5.74

Review Jackie Mason - A Night At The Opera / Dd Home Entertainment:


Review Sanctuary Digital Entertainment / Henry Rollins - You Saw Me Up There [1996]
Actors & Directors
  • Henry Rollins
Release date: 2001-04-30
Run time: 83 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £7.97

Review Henry Rollins - You Saw Me Up There [1996] / Sanctuary Digital Entertainment:


Review Warner Home Video / The Great St. Trinian's Train Robbery [1966]
Actors & Directors
  • Raymond Huntley
  • Reg Varney
  • Dora Bryan
  • Sidney Gilliat
  • Frankie Howerd
  • George Cole
  • Frank Launder
Release date: 1997-08-18
Run time: 90 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £9.94

Review The Great St. Trinian's Train Robbery [1966] / Warner Home Video:


Review 2 Entertain Video / Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps - Series 1 - Complete [2001]
Actors & Directors
  • Sheridan Smith
  • Gareth Carrivick
  • Natalie Casey
  • Will Mellor
  • Kathryn Drysdale
  • Ralf Little
Release date: 2002-04-22
Run time: 180 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £6.59

Review Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps - Series 1 - Complete [2001] / 2 Entertain Video:

Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps is yet another of British television's endless and fruitless efforts to emulate such American sitcom leviathans as Friends. One can only wonder why they bother. The American networks have the immense reservoirs of money necessary to hire ensembles of superstar actors and legions of clever writers; Two Pints of Lager is a pretty clear-cut case of the title also being the production budget. The five northern students the series revolves around are all thoroughly charmless and unsympathetic-something like Big Brother contestants with a script-and while it is possible to make a great sitcom in which none of the characters is remotely likable, the writing has to be amazingly good-on a par, in fact, with Fawlty Towers, I'm Alan Partridge or The Office. Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, in contrast, is little more than a series of limps from one ancient joke about bodily functions to the next. -Andrew Mueller.

Review Cinema Club / Beautiful Thing [1996]
Actors & Directors
  • Hettie MacDonald
  • Meera Syal
  • Linda Henry
  • Martin Walsh (III)
  • Glen Berry
  • Steven M. Martin (II)
Release date: 2000-09-04
Run time: 85 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £3.88

Review Beautiful Thing [1996] / Cinema Club:

A grim, gritty South London housing estate makes an unlikley setting for a romantic fairy-tale, but Hetti MacDonald's gay teenage love story all but brings it off. Adapted by screenwriter Jonathan Harvey from his own stage play, Beautiful Thing tells how teenage loner Jamie falls for next-door neighbour Ste, one of the tough kids who bullies him at school. Amazingly, he finds his feelings reciprocated, and the two progress to a tender, tentative affair. Sidestepping conventional notions of working-class homophobia, the film succeeds in presenting its central relationship not as anything startlingly different, but simply as a teenage romance-with all the joy and heartbreak it implies-that happens to be between two 15-year-old guys. Problems of brutality and deprivation are acknowledged but never allowed to dominate, and under the influence of love even the harsh walkways and terraces of the estate take on a sunlit glow. -Philip Kemp.

Review BBC Video / Red Dwarf I - Confidence & Paranoia (Byte 2) [1988]
Actors & Directors
  • Norman Lovett
  • Craig Charles
  • Danny John-Jules
  • Chris Barrie
  • Ed Bye
Release date: 1998-02-16
Run time: 87 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.49

Review Red Dwarf I - Confidence & Paranoia (Byte 2) [1988] / BBC Video:


Review 4 Front Video / Letter To Brezhnev [1985]
Actors & Directors
  • Margi Clarke
  • Alexandra Pigg
  • Chris Bernard
  • Alfred Molina
  • Peter Firth
  • Tracy Marshak-Nash
Release date: 1994-02-14
Run time: 91 min.
Price: £5.99

Review Letter To Brezhnev [1985] / 4 Front Video:


Review BBC Video / Red Dwarf - Series 1 - Episodes 1-3 [Remastered] [1988]
Actors & Directors
  • Chris Barrie
  • Ed Bye
  • Danny John-Jules
  • Craig Charles
  • Norman Lovett
Release date: 1998-02-16
Run time: 88 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £1.88

Review Red Dwarf - Series 1 - Episodes 1-3 [Remastered] [1988] / BBC Video:


Review Bmg Music Programming / Trigger Happy [1997]
Actors & Directors
  • Gabriel Byrne
  • Larry Bishop
  • Jeff Goldblum
  • Ellen Barkin
  • Richard Dreyfuss
  • Diane Lane
Release date: 2001-06-04
Run time: 89 min.
Price: £5.99

Review Trigger Happy [1997] / Bmg Music Programming:


Review 2 Entertain Video / Fawlty Towers - The Psychiatrist + The Builders + The Wedding Party [1975]
Actors & Directors
  • Andrew Sachs
  • Connie Booth
  • Prunella Scales
  • John Howard-Davies
  • John Cleese
Release date: 1998-10-12
Run time: 117 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.40

Review Fawlty Towers - The Psychiatrist + The Builders + The Wedding Party [1975] / 2 Entertain Video:


Review 4 Front Video / Big Fat Liar [2002]
Actors & Directors
  • Frankie Muniz
  • Donald Faison
  • Paul Giamatti
  • Amanda Detmer
  • Lee Majors
  • Shawn Levy
Release date: 2003-02-03
Run time: 84 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £0.38

Review Big Fat Liar [2002] / 4 Front Video:

Pitting kids against grown-ups has always been a reliable source of comedy, and Big Fat Liar indulges the "smart kid vs dumb adult" fantasy with infectious enthusiasm. In this case it's Frankie Muniz from TV's Malcolm in the Middle, playing a Michigan eighth-grader whose penchant for lying results in parental scorn when he claims that a Hollywood movie mogul (ace character actor Paul Giamatti) has stolen the kid's hastily written English essay and turned it into his upcoming summer blockbuster. The kid only wants to prove his honesty and recruits his girlfriend (spunky TV star Amanda Bynes) to beat the honcho on his Hollywood turf. Elaborate practical jokes and slapstick gags turn this kid stuff (scripted and produced by two former child stars) into an enjoyable send-up of Hollywood absurdity. When combined with Giamatti's mastery of slow-burning megalomania, the show-biz in-jokes and Home Alone-style anarchy make this a harmless diversion for the young and young-at-heart. -Jeff Shannon.

Review Universal Pictures UK / Ardal O'Hanlon - Live In Dublin
Actors & Directors
  • Ardal O'Hanlon
Release date: 1997-11-10
Run time: 60 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £11.61

Review Ardal O'Hanlon - Live In Dublin / Universal Pictures UK:


Models & Brands:
Brass - Complete First Series [1983], The Royle Family - The Complete Series 2 [1998], Kevin Turvey - The Man Behind The Green Door [1982], Friends - Series 1 - Episodes 1-4 [1995], Laurel And Hardy - Be Big / Laughing Gravy [1931], Brazil (1985), Nothing To Lose [1997], The Huggetts Abroad, Jackie Mason - A Night At The Opera, Henry Rollins - You Saw Me Up There [1996], The Great St. Trinian's Train Robbery [1966], Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps - Series 1 - Complete [2001], Beautiful Thing [1996], Red Dwarf I - Confidence & Paranoia (Byte 2) [1988], Letter To Brezhnev [1985], Red Dwarf - Series 1 - Episodes 1-3 [Remastered] [1988], Trigger Happy [1997], Fawlty Towers - The Psychiatrist + The Builders + The Wedding Party [1975], Big Fat Liar [2002], Ardal O'Hanlon - Live In Dublin

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