Pomona Rewind

  It seems wonderfully apt that Daisy Haggard's sitcom 'Back to Life' essentially got a second chance to find an audience over lockdown. A comedy drama about a middle class woman trying to make the best of her own second chance after serving time for murder, the BBC3 and Showtime show slipped out quietly on BBC1's schedules and the BBC iPlayer over April 2019. Those who saw the show raved about 'Back to Life' but it remained largely under the viewing public's radar. However when lockdown happened in 2020, 'Back to Life' popped up on many people's algorithm on Netflix and was discovered by a whole new audience. Haggard plays Miri, a woman who has spent the prime of her youth - her twenties and thirties - behind bars. Released from prison where she was jailed for the clifftop murder of her best friend in Kent when she was teenager, she wants to embrace the opportunity to forge a new life. However, with no money and no job, that means returning to t

   It's hard to write about the second season of 'Succession' without giving away some key plot twists from the previous season . So, in the style of a newsreader urging viewers to look away now if they do not wish to hear the result of tonight's football match, I've penned this advisory. If you don't want to know what happened in Season One of 'Succession,' please find another review on this website. (SPOILERS ALERT!!!) Season Two of 'Succession' finds Jeremy Strong's Kendall Roy a cowed and broken man. Recuperating in Iceland at his father's behest after the spectacular failure of his boardroom coup, Kendall is summoned to appear on TV to declare the takeover of Waystar Royco dead. Also in hoc to his father over the cover-up of a 'Chappaquidick' style car crash that killed a waiter he was doing drugs with, Kendall goes on the record to claim Brian Cox's Logan Roy has a much better plan for Waystar Royco than the bid he almos

As soon as one must see TV drama ends its run, we tend to look for a replacement. HBO's Mafia epic The Sopranos' fired the opening salvo in the battle to be regarded as the greatest TV drama of all time. But when it ended its run, 'Six Feet Under,' The Wire,' 'Mad Men,' 'Breaking Bad,' 'The Killing,' 'The Bridge,' 'Line of Duty,' 'Game of Thrones,' 'Narcos' and 'Better Call Saul' all took their turns at vying for the title.  Some have come close but David Chase's Mafia continues to reign supreme. Some of those shows preceded the rise of streaming. Since then, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple+, HBO Max, NowTV, Hulu, Britbox and Disney+ have given viewers an abundance of shows to choose from, forcing us to work even harder to pan for TV gold. The current pretender to the crown of the greatest TV drama of all time, though, is 'Succession' on HBO. Created by British writer Jesse Armstrong, who was b

It all began with 'Tron'. Steven Lisberger's 1982 cult Disney sci-fi family adventure with Jeff Bridges was the first to imagine a world inside a video game. It has also been credited by John Lasseter with inspiring the use of computer animation in films. "Without 'Tron,' there would be no 'Toy Story'," he declared. Since then, studios have either tried to cash in on popular video game franchises or recreated the dynamics or feel of gaming. 28 years ago Disney's Buena Vista Pictures was the first to try to turn a popular computer game into box office gold, with a movie based on Nintendo's 'Super Mario Bros'. Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel's movie, with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the Italian American plumbers Mario and Luigi flopped spectacularly, with its box office falling short of its $45 million budget. It has since emerged as a cult film and in the past week an animated feature of the game has been announced with Chr