Pomona Rewind

Honor Blackman never took herself seriously. An actress with a natural flair for comedy, she set her sights early on in her life on an acting career and caught the public's imagination as the high kicking Cathy Gale in ITV's 'The Avengers'. But she also earned her place in film history as the rather suggestively named, Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery's James Bond in the movie 'Goldfinger'. Born in Essex in 1925, her father was a civil service statistician from the East End of London. "He constantly pushed us to be better, was a bit of a disciplinarian and would whack us quite a bit - sometimes with his thick Army belt - which you got on the bare bottom," she recalled in an interview with the insurance company Saga. "My mother was warm but downtrodden and afraid of my father because he could be so violent. "She gave in to everything because she wanted a quiet life. But I loved my father and he's the reason that I suc...

Adverts are the lifeblood of commercial television. But they have also been a calling card for directors looking to make their break into the movies. So what are  the magnificent seven  advertising memories from the analogue TV age? TUDOR CRISPS A young Geordie lad is about to go on his newspaper round in the dim, dark recession days of the 1970s. Is he desperate to earn some money for his starving family of 12? No, he'd rather take a few packets of Tudor Crisps out of his wages (an 'I'm alright Jack' Thatcherite if there ever was one). "Greeat fleeahva, Tewdah!" the simple soul tells his boss who is only too happy to pay the lad in crisps rather than wages  and then the boy's off, whizzing around rainy Tyneside in his bike on his newspaper round. Next we see our hero on a street corner, offering a "canny bag" of Tudor crisps to another kid in return for delivering his newspapers. Ah but there's a twist in...

2013 was the year when cinema went into an existential crisis. Hollywood studios bombarded audiences with noisy, overblown blockbusters, so-so animations and a succession of lame comedies. But some of cinema's most respected actors and directors began to openly question whether the studio system was broken. Some even started to migrate to the small screen in search of decent work. After releasing 'Behind the Candelabra' in European cinemas but on US television for HBO, Steven Soderbergh was so dispirited, he announced his retirement from making movies. Whether Soderbergh was right to abandon cinema was questionable as a rash of strong independent movies at the end of the year proved. But there was no doubt that Hollywood's studios seemed less inclined towards funding decent mainstream feature dramas and more inclined towards effects driven blockbusters like ' Iron Man 3 ' and ' Man of Steel '. The rise of quality longform TV dramas ...