Friday, August 15, 2008

Extra Shakespeare from Extras

“Episode 2.5.” By Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Perf. Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Ashley Jensen, Sir Ian McKellen, Germaine Greer, Mark Kermode and Mark Lawson. Dir. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Extras. Season 2, episode 5. BBC / HBO. 12 October 2006. DVD. Universal Pictures Video, 2007.
Extras continues to provide Shakespearean fodder (another was mentioned previously). Because the BBC series Shakespeare Retold came to mind this morning, I remembered this exchange.

Our protagonist wants to do something more serious than a terrible sitcom to increase his acting credibility, so he asks his agent about the possibilities. Here’s the conversation (starting with the line in the image above):
Darren (the agent): BBC are doing more of those modern adaptations of Shakespeare.

Andy (the protagonist): Right.

Darren: Doing King Lear.

Andy [Interested]: Okay. Who’s playing Lear?

Darren: Tom Bosley.

Andy: No.
Lovely. Just lovely.
Links: The official site for Extras.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

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 —The Tempest