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David Renwick
David Peter Renwick (; born 4 September 1951) is an English author, television writer, actor, director and executive producer, best known for creation of the sitcom ''One Foot in the Grave'' and the mystery series ''Jonathan Creek''. He was awarded the Writers Guild Ronnie Barker Award at the 2008 British Comedy Awards. Early life The son and only child of James George Renwick (born 1924) and Winifred May Renwick (née Smith) who were married in 1948, David Renwick was born and brought up in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. He was educated at Luton Grammar School, including its Sixth Form, a former state grammar school. The school became known as Luton Sixth Form College while he was still a pupil. He studied journalism at Harlow Technical College. Career 1970s Before becoming a comedy writer Renwick worked as a journalist, reporter and sub-editor on his home town newspaper, the ''Luton News''. On beginning his comedy writing career in the mid-1970s he initially submitted materi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luton
Luton () is a town and unitary authority with borough status, in Bedfordshire, England. At the 2011 census, the Luton built-up area subdivision had a population of 211,228 and its built-up area, including the adjacent towns of Dunstable and Houghton Regis, had a population of 258,018. It is the most populous town in the county, from the County Towns of Hertford, from Bedford and from London. The town is situated on the River Lea, about north-north-west of London. The town's foundation dates to the sixth century as a Saxon outpost on the River Lea, from which Luton derives its name. Luton is recorded in the Domesday Book as ''Loitone'' and ''Lintone'' and one of the largest churches in Bedfordshire, St Mary's Church, was built in the 12th century. There are local museums which explore Luton's history in Wardown Park and Stockwood Park. Luton was, for many years, widely known for hatmaking and also had a large Vauxhall Motors factory. Car production at the plant be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ITV (TV Network)
ITV is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network. It was launched in 1955 as Independent Television to provide competition to BBC Television (established in 1936). ITV is the oldest commercial network in the UK. Since the passing of the Broadcasting Act 1990, it has been legally known as Channel 3 to distinguish it from the other analogue channels at the time, BBC1, BBC2 and Channel 4. ITV was for four decades a network of separate companies which provided regional television services and also shared programmes between each other to be shown on the entire network. Each franchise was originally owned by a different company. After several mergers, the fifteen regional franchises are now held by two companies: ITV plc, which runs the ITV1 channel, and STV Group, which runs the STV channel. The ITV network is a separate entity from ITV plc, the company that resulted from the merger of Granada plc and Carlton Communications in 2004. ITV plc holds the Channel 3 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Wilson (Scottish Actor)
Richard Wilson (born Iain Carmichael Wilson; 9 July 1936) is a Scottish actor, theatre director and broadcaster. He is most famous for playing Victor Meldrew in the BBC sitcom ''One Foot in the Grave''. Another notable role was as Gaius, the court physician of Camelot, in the BBC drama '' Merlin''. Early life Wilson was born in Greenock, Scotland. He went to the Lady Alice Primary school in Greenock. He studied science subjects at Greenock Academy, then completed his National Service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in Singapore. Career Wilson worked in a laboratory at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow as a research assistant before switching to acting at age 27. He trained at RADA and then appeared in repertory theatres in Edinburgh (Traverse Theatre), Glasgow and Manchester (Stables Theatre). Wilson initially turned down the role of Victor Meldrew and it was almost offered to Les Dawson before Wilson changed his mind. Wilson was awarded the OBE in the 1994 B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Gordon Sinclair
John Gordon Sinclair (born Gordon John Sinclair; 4 February 1962) is a Scottish actor, voice actor, singer, and novelist. He is best known for portraying Gregory in the 1981 film ''Gregory's Girl''. There was a Gordon Sinclair already registered with Equity, so he took John Gordon Sinclair as his professional name. In 2019, Sinclair played Drew Cubbin in the BBC drama ''Traces''. Life and career Sinclair was born on 4 February 1962 in Glasgow and started work as an apprentice electrician. At 15 he joined Glasgow's Youth Theatre after he visited one night and met Robert Buchanan, a fellow fan of Canadian progressive rock group Rush. As a result, he starred in a number of films by director Bill Forsyth, perhaps the most notable of which is 1981's ''Gregory's Girl'', shot when he was 19 years old. He reprised the role nearly two decades later in ''Gregory's Two Girls'' (1999), and also appeared in Forsyth's '' Local Hero'' (1983). His other film roles included appearances in ''Br ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geoffrey Palmer (actor)
Geoffrey Dyson Palmer (4 June 1927 – 5 November 2020) was an English actor. He was best known for his roles in British television sitcoms playing Jimmy Anderson in ''The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin'' (1976–79), Ben Parkinson in ''Butterflies'' (1978–1983) and Lionel Hardcastle in '' As Time Goes By'' (1992–2005). His film appearances include '' A Fish Called Wanda'' (1988), ''The Madness of King George'' (1994), ''Mrs Brown'' (1997) and ''Tomorrow Never Dies'' (1997). Early life and education Geoffrey Dyson Palmer was born on 4 June 1927 in London, England. He was the son of Frederick Charles Palmer, who was a chartered surveyor, and Norah Gwendolen (née Robins). He attended Highgate School from September 1939 to December 1945. He served as a corporal instructor in small arms and field training in the Royal Marines during his national service from 1946 to 1948, following which he briefly worked as an unpaid trainee assistant stage manager. Career Palmer's early t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Hardy
Timothy Sydney Robert Hardy (29 October 1925 – 3 August 2017) was an English actor who had a long career in theatre, film and television. He began his career as a classical actor and later earned widespread recognition for roles such as Siegfried Farnon in the BBC television series '' All Creatures Great and Small'', Cornelius Fudge in the ''Harry Potter'' film series and Winston Churchill in several productions, beginning with the Southern Television series '' Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years''. He was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Actor for ''All Creatures Great and Small'' in 1980 and ''Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years'' in 1982. Aside from acting, Hardy was an acknowledged expert on the medieval English longbow and wrote two books on the subject. Early life Hardy was born in Cheltenham in 1925 to Henry Harrison Hardy, MBE, of Old Farm, Bishop's Cleeve, Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, and Edith Jocelyn, daughter of Rev. Sydney Dugdale, rector of Whitchurch, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hot Metal
''Hot Metal'' (1986–88) is a British sitcom produced by London Weekend Television about the newspaper industry. Written by David Renwick and Andrew Marshall, it is very much a continuation in style from their previous sitcom '' Whoops Apocalypse!''. It was produced by Humphrey Barclay. Synopsis The ''Daily Crucible'', the dullest newspaper in Fleet Street, is suddenly taken over by media magnate Terence "Twiggy" Rathbone (Robert Hardy) (an obvious parody of real-life magnates, especially Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell). Its editor Harry Stringer (Geoffrey Palmer) is 'promoted' to managing editor, and is replaced in his old job by Russell Spam (also played by Hardy). At first Stringer is convinced that Spam is in fact Rathbone in disguise, until he sees the two of them together (via split-screen). In a later episode Stringer meets the paper's board of directors, all of whom are also played by Hardy. Spam takes the paper shooting downmarket and turns the Crucible into a s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parody
A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its subject is an original work or some aspect of it (theme/content, author, style, etc), but a parody can also be about a real-life person (e.g. a politician), event, or movement (e.g. the French Revolution or 1960s counterculture). Literary scholar Professor Simon Dentith defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice". The literary theorist Linda Hutcheon said "parody ... is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, music, theater, television and film, animation, and gaming. Some parody is practiced in theater. The writer and critic John Gross observes in his ''Oxford Boo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thames Television
Thames Television, commonly simplified to just Thames, was a Broadcast license, franchise holder for a region of the British ITV (TV network), ITV television network serving Greater London, London and surrounding areas from 30 July 1968 until the night of 31 December 1992. Thames Television broadcast from 9:25 Monday morning to 5:15 Friday afternoon (7:00 Friday night until 1982) at which time it would hand over to London Weekend Television (LWT). Formed as a joint company, it merged the television interests of British Electric Traction (trading as Associated-Rediffusion) owning 49%, and Associated British Picture Corporation—soon taken over by EMI—owning 51%. Like all ITV franchisees, it was a broadcaster, a producer and a commissioner of television programmes, making shows both for the local region it covered and, as one of the History of ITV#The Big Four and Big Five, "Big Five" ITV companies, for networking nationally across the ITV regions. After its loss of franchise i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nuclear Weapons
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. The first test of a fission ("atomic") bomb released an amount of energy approximately equal to . The first thermonuclear ("hydrogen") bomb test released energy approximately equal to . Nuclear bombs have had yields between 10 tons TNT (the W54) and 50 megatons for the Tsar Bomba (see TNT equivalent). A thermonuclear weapon weighing as little as can release energy equal to more than . A nuclear device no larger than a conventional bomb can devastate an entire city by blast, fire, and radiation. Since they are weapons of mass destruction, the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a focus of international relations policy. Nuclear weapons have been deployed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Whoops Apocalypse
''Whoops Apocalypse'' is a six-part 1982 television sitcom by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, made by London Weekend Television for ITV. Marshall and Renwick later reworked the concept as a 1986 film of the same name from ITC Entertainment, with almost completely different characters and plot, although one or two of the original actors returned in different roles. The British budget label Channel 5 Video released a compilation cassette of all six episodes edited together into one 137-minute chunk in 1987. In 2010, Network released both the complete, unedited series and the movie on a 2-DVD set ( Region 2) entitled ''Whoops Apocalypse: The Complete Apocalypse''. (Rights issues were simplified by the fact that both LWT and ITC Entertainment productions were by this time owned by Granada Television). In March 2022 the series was made available for streaming on BritBox. Series The series details the weeks leading up to the Apocalypse. It features a chaotic and increasingly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Little And Large
''Little and Large'' were a British comedy double act comprising straight man Syd Little (born Cyril John Mead; 19 December 1942) and comic Eddie Large (born Edward Hugh McGinnis; 25 June 1941 – 2 April 2020). Comedy duo They formed their partnership in 1962, originally appearing as singers in local pubs around north-west England. According to an interview with Eddie Large in ''Metro'' newspaper (11 January 2019), they went professional in October 1963. After deciding to concentrate on comedy, Little and Large's big break came in 1971 when they appeared on ITV talent show '' Opportunity Knocks''. They won the programme's vote, turning them into household names virtually overnight. Within five years, the duo had their own prime-time show on ITV called ''The Little and Large Tellyshow''. It began with a pilot episode in 1976, which earned the pair a commission for a series in 1977. However, the duo transferred to BBC1 with a new show called ''The Little and Large Show'' from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
