Waking the Dead - wrapping up Season 6 (2006)

Double Bind. Richard Warlow. The hippy trippy one. In the sixties a pioneering / deluded therapist helps patients by prescribing strong acid which leads to murder. But who did what? Miles Anderson is in a perpetual mania  - we were quite relieved when it was over  

Yahrzeit. Declan Croghan. And a chilling one about eugenics. It seems that before dying Mel started to investigate the murder of a Polish child in London in 1945. It leads back to the frightful experiments of Mengele and a contemporary German family with secrets. 

The Comedy Man (1963)

 Should definitely be required watching for anybody thinking of taking up acting as a career. It’s not for the faint hearted.

Moment where Kenneth More is in the theatre watching another actor audition and knows his lines better than he does is cool

Waking the Dead Season 6 cont. (2006)

Mask of Sanity. Laurence Davey & Declan Croghan.

Nicholas Beveney is released from prison after serving term for three murders he's confessed to. Starts to hang out in deserted former home where - through flashbacks - we learn he's been seriously abused as a boy. (How come the BBC showed this one but not the other one?) He actually sees his boy-self, which is a good move. And then starts walking about like a zombie.

Boyd and the team don't believe he did it, particularly when former parties come into play: Paul Ritter, Jemma Redgrave, James Fox, Martin Marquez, Richard Dillane, Dominic Letts.

I'd had an idea watching a former episode, thinking 'Why don't the abused teenagers gang together and overpower the abuser?' Maybe Davey & Croghan did too.

I must admit I don't quite know why he confessed in the first place. Good scene where he joins Redgrave's book reading kids.

Waking the Dead - Season 6 (2006)

OK it's not quite as mad as the last one, but Deus Ex Machina does begin with a man sewing his own lips together, cut against the British Army in Sudan in the 1860s - Nicholas Blincoe is the writer (also 8 Minutes Idle). Alex Jennings, Polly Walker (Enchanted April, Rome), Graham Crowden (always nice to see him) and Adam James are involved in the shady disappearance of an ancient skull, and a club of oiks which turns out to be  breeding ground for future Intelligence operatives.

Jennings plays a professional 'truth getter' i.e. torturer of political prisoners, so he and Boyd have a merry conversation about ethics and for once Boyd can't rattle him.

The Fall. Damian Wayling. Two lovers are found mummified in a disused bank - 'Adam and Eve'. Goes back to bank collapses in 1992.

Peter Capaldi (Local Hero) and Stanley Townsend (primarily a stage actor, Happy Go Lucky) were the names I maddeningly couldn't recollect. With Terence Harvey, Nick Dunning, Oliver Ford Davies. The action moves to Dublin where amusingly Spence is usurped by Townsend as Boyd's No. 2. Catherine Walker is the journalist.

Sue Johnston's been fabulous from the word go.

Columbo: It's All in the Game (1993 Vincent McEveety)

Fallen-from-grace Faye Dunaway was already looking weird through plastic surgery. She and girlfriend Claudia Christian have bumped off serial adulterer Armando Pucci in quite an ingenious way, but it doesn't hold water for our doggedly persistent detective. Peter Falk wrote it and exec produced.

Dunaway's all over him, to try and distract him from the case, which is frankly embarrassing. And doesn't work - obviously.

Dunaway's career never really recovered after the disastrous Mommie Dearest in 1981. The famous post-Oscar photo by Terry O'Neill:

Taken March 29 1977 the morning after her win for Network