Post by fitzoliverj on Jul 6, 2020 20:14:04 GMT
On BBC2 last night there was a mockumentary starring the Kemp brothers (Martin and Gary from Spandau Ballet, plus long-lost brother 'Ross Kemp not that one') which was essentially a follow-up to Rhys Thomas's Brian Pern series, with all-new characters and some of the same cast.
One of the returning actors was Christopher Ecclestone, playing himself. He appears in a sequence when Martin Kemp is trying to get a big-budget movie off the ground, in which Al Capone raises a load of British gangsters from the dead. This being a very silly idea which extends little further than the movie poster, it's got a bloody good cast - the Kemps reprising their roles as the Krays, Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Jackie the Ripper, plus Nicholas Lyndhurst, Bernard Cribbins, and others, with big guest star Bob Hoskins (who won't return phone calls) as Capone. As it turns out, the only person other than the Kemps to turn up to the the read-through for investors is Daniel Mays (playing Dick Turpin), with Christopher Ecclestone - cast as John McVicar - teleconferencing in from Hollywood.
In the script, the gangsters discover they've been resurrected from suspended-animation and also sent through a time thingy. Only John McVicar (public-enemy-no-1-turned-journalist) has any explanation for this; when challenged on the science of it all, one character asks him sarcastically whether he thinks he's a doctor, and he replies that he is. Obviously this is a gag about Ecclestone playing Doctor Who, but it also references McVicar's real-life studying for degrees post-prison.
Also, as with the Brian Pern series, there are redubbed excerpts from classic DW. It is revealed that the Kemps, as boys, played DW monsters - Gary was the plastic chair that ate people in 'Menopause of the Autons', and Gary was a Dalek on the grounds they had to be played by short people.
Anyway, it was all very amusing, but at an hour went on for too much at a time (and had too little Michael Kitchen).
