Upcoming BBC Programing Featuring 3 Doctors
Here is the BBC Drama Autumn/Winter show-reel, including the first glimpses of the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas Special, guest starring Michael Gambon and Katherine Jenkins.
Also popping in the trail are Christopher Eccleston (Accused), David Tennant (Single Father), Matt Smith again (Christopher & His Kind) and Mark Gatiss (First Men in the Moon). [It also features an insane amount of awesome British people.]
Featured Programs: Accused, Aurelio Zen, Christopher and His Kind, The Crimson Petal and the White, Doctor Who Christmas Special, The First Men in the Moon, Hattie, Lip Service, The Nativity, Outcasts, The Shadow Line, Silk, Single Father, The Song of Lunch, South Riding, Toast, Upstairs Downstairs, When Harvey Met Bob, and Women in Love
Accused
Christopher Eccleston and Mackenzie Crook star in Accused, written by Jimmy McGovern.
Each episode features a separate story, which start as an ordinary individual is led to the dock to hear his fate. As each episode unravels we learn how each man came to be there. But on reflection should they be the accused? Are they innocent or guilty or somewhere in between? And will the jury make the right judgement?
Lapsed Catholic Willy (played by Christopher Eccleston) does his best; he's a good plumber and a loving father, but he fails to be a faithful husband.
Just when Willy is about to confess to his wife Carmel (played by Pooky Quesnel), his daughter announces she's getting married. Willy's guilty secret must wait while pressure from all sides keeps growing. He is about to implode when he finds something in the back of a cab and it's either the answer to his prayers or the beginning of his downfall...
Christopher And His Kind
Christopher Isherwood (played by Matt Smith), escapes repressive English society and his suffocating relationship with his mother, Kathleen (played by Lindsay Duncan), for the decadent - and politically unstable - world of Thirties Berlin.
The hedonistic cabaret scene of Berlin in the Thirties is in full swing when wide-eyed young writer Christopher Isherwood arrives in the city, unable to speak a word of German.
To Isherwood's reserved English sensibility, the city's thriving gay subculture is thrilling and intoxicating, but he soon finds himself heartbroken after the failure of a hopeless love affair, and so sets out on a process of self-discovery.
The Crimson Petal & The White
The Crimson Petal & The White is a four-part adaptation of Michel Faber's international best-selling novel on BBC Two.
Adapted by acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon and directed by Marc Munden, this intimate psychological thriller lifts the lid on the darker side of Victorian London revealing a world seething with vitality, sexuality, ambition and emotion.
This provocative and riveting tale tells the story of Sugar (Romola Garai), an alluring, intelligent young prostitute who yearns for a better life away from the brothel she is attached to - run by the contemptible Mrs Castaway (Gillian Anderson).
The First Men In The Moon
*Preview at link
It's July 1969 and the Apollo 11 astronauts are about to make their historic Moon landing. But they are in for a surprise - somebody has beaten them to it.
Mark Gatiss takes the lead role as Edwardian scientist Professor Cavor in his own adaptation of HG Wells's science fiction classic, The First Men In The Moon, for BBC Four.
As the world waits for news of Apollo 11, a young boy meets 90-year-old Julius Bedford (Rory Kinnear) who tells him an extraordinary story.
Outcasts
A group of courageous pioneers face a unique opportunity: the chance to build a new and better future on another planet. Outcasts is an epic new eight-part drama series created by Ben Richards for BBC One.
They are led by President Tate and his core team of Stella, Cass and Fleur - they took charge and settled here first alongside Expeditionaries Mitchell and Jack.
They are a diverse group of individuals who left their old lives behind in extraordinary circumstances; promised a second chance at life they created a society, far away from their home, friends, family... and their pasts.
The Shadow Line
Chiwetel Ejiofor (American Gangster, Endgame, Talk To Me), Christopher Eccleston (Lennon Naked, Doctor Who), Sir Antony Sher (The Wolfman, Primo) and Stephen Rea (The Crying Game, Breakfast on Pluto) are to star in The Shadow Line, BBC Two's landmark noir thriller written, produced and directed by Hugo Blick (Sensitive Skin, Marion And Geoff).
From the cop with a bullet in his brain, whose amnesia leaves him doubtful of his own moral compass; to the drug-lord driven by a profound personal tragedy, risking it all on one last deal; to the brilliantly lethal puppet-master who gradually emerges from the shadows to bring the story to its shocking climax - The Shadow Line explores the morality of these characters as they negotiate the repercussions of Wratten's death and attempt to navigate the fine line between right and wrong.
Single Father
Single Father is an emotionally powerful yet funny four-part drama for BBC One, about a man struggling to raise his four children after the death of his wife.
Written by Mick Ford, and set in Glasgow, the series tells the story of Dave, played by David Tennant, a photographer facing the seemingly impossible job of bringing up his four kids alone.
Things get even more complicated when he begins to fall in love with Sarah, played by Suranne Jones, his wife's best friend.
Is Dave betraying Rita by falling in love again so quickly, or will he be walking away from happiness if he ignores his feelings? With his children at the centre of his world, Dave worries what will happen when they find out.
The Song Of Lunch
Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson star in a powerful and visually arresting film, The Song Of Lunch, on BBC Two.
The film, a dramatisation of Christopher Reid's narrative poem, tells the story of an unnamed book editor (Alan Rickman) who, 15 years after their break-up, is meeting his former love (Emma Thompson) for a nostalgic lunch at Zanzotti's, the Soho restaurant they used to frequent.
The woman is now living a glamorous life in Paris, married to a world-renowned writer, whilst the unnamed editor has failed in his writing career, detests his mundane publishing job and regrets the end of their love affair. When he arrives at Zanzotti's he finds it under new management and much changed, and this seems to fuel his resentment about growing older and being left behind.
South Riding
South Riding is a new three-part adaptation of the novel by Winifred Holtby, by Andrew Davies, for BBC One. This 20th-century classic is a rich and panoramic portrait of a Yorkshire community in the Thirties that carries surprising and refreshing echoes of our own time.
In the long aftermath of the First World War, Sarah Burton (Anna Maxwell Martin), comes home from London to Yorkshire. Having lost her chance of marriage and motherhood with her fiancé's death in the trenches, Sarah has become a very modern career woman, one of the "surplus two million" identified by the Daily Mail in 1920 as women who were unlikely to marry since their generation of men had been wiped out by war.
Now in her thirties, Sarah has come home to take up the position of headmistress at a struggling Yorkshire high school for girls. She is the very image of a modern woman, much more recognisable to her sisters in 2010 than she would have been to her contemporaries in 1935, full of ambition, passion and fire to take her life into her own hands and live it to the very limit of her strength.
Toast
Toast is the ultimate nostalgia trip through everything edible in sixties Britain. Based on the heart-wrenching bitter-sweet story of renowned food writer and chef Nigel Slater's childhood, Toast is a delicious retrieval of the tastes and smells that a young boy associates with his journey into adulthood.
Nigel's stepmother will be played by Helena Bonham Carter, with Freddie Highmore set to portray Slater as a 15-year-old boy.
The film is based on Nigel Slater's bestselling autobiographical novel and has been written by Lee Hall.
When Harvey Met Bob
When Harvey Met Bob, is a new drama which follows one of the most iconic moments in 20th-century history, Live Aid; the biggest televised international charity event in history.
This one-off, 90-minute drama stars Domhnall Gleeson as Bob Geldof and Ian Hart as Harvey Goldsmith, the two men who together changed the politics of international aid forever.
In October 1984 Bob Geldof arrives home to find his wife, Paula, watching the legendary BBC broadcast by Michael Buerk from the feeding camps in Eritrea province. Bob takes his eyes from the screen only once to see Paula holding their baby and weeping.
Deeply affected, Bob moves into action. First he persuades a host of rock stars to give their name and talent for free to the Band Aid record Do They Know It's Christmas? which sells millions of copies. But when he goes to Ethiopia to ensure the proceeds from the record will reach the starving people, he realises that so much more needs to be done. He needs to raise even more money to fulfill his promise that every penny from the record will get there. It is at this point that he conceives the idea of a global music event to feed the world.
Women In Love
Women In Love charts the lives and loves of two sisters, Ursula (Rachael Stirling) and Gudrun Brangwen (Rosamund Pike), as they move into adulthood, viewed chiefly through their relationships with two friends, Rupert Birkin (Rory Kinnear) and Gerald Crich (Joseph Mawle).
As the two relationships intensify the couples leave the Midlands and go abroad together, leading to conflict and tragedy.
Based on two novels by DH Lawrence - The Rainbow and Women In Love - which Lawrence originally intended to publish together as The Sisters, William Ivory has melded the books together in line with Lawrence's original vision.
Plus: Doctor Who only clips for the lazy ass folk.
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