Cucumber: I Say Banana

Vincent Franklin, Cyril Nri, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Freddie Fox, Fisayo Akinade, Con O’Neill, James Murray and Ceallach Spellman confirmed to star in Cucumber and Banana on Channel 4 and E4.

Star of The Thick of It and Twenty Twelve, Vincent Franklin will join Coronation Street’s Julie Hesmondhalgh in the cast of new Channel 4 drama series Cucumber, from the multi BAFTA award-winning writer of Queer As Folk and Doctor Who, Russell T Davies.

Filming in Manchester has begun on Cucumber (8 x 60’) for broadcast on Channel 4 in 2015, with E4 series Banana (8 x 30’) to start production next month. The cast also includes; Cyril Nri (The Bill), Freddie Fox (Parade’s End), Fisayo Akinade (Fresh Meat), Con O’Neill (Uncle), James Murray (Primeval) and Ceallach Spellman (Waterloo Road).

Life for 46-year-old Henry (Vincent Franklin) and his boyfriend Lance (Cyril Nri) is comfortable and settled. But after the most disastrous date night in history - involving a threesome, two police cars, and Boney M - Henry's old life shatters, and his new life begins...

With the same ferocious wit, startling honesty and heartfelt warmth that made Queer As Folk a landmark Channel 4 series, Cucumber will explore the passions and pitfalls of 21st century gay life for Henry, Lance and co, while on E4, Banana will follow the individual lives of characters orbiting around Henry’s world. On 4oD, Tofu will be an anarchic and entertaining factual series about sex - from gay to straight, and anything in between - inspired by the dramas each week...

Channel 4 press office.

Can't wait.

Russell T Davies: Cucumber!

"I once read about a scientific institute which had studied the male erection. It divided the hard-on into four categories, from soft to hard. One, tofu. Two, peeled banana. Three, banana. And four, cucumber. Right there and then, I knew I had my drama. And it's a joy to be back with Channel 4 and RED, to tell these stories."

Russell T Davies, from an exciting Channel 4 press release.

Great.

We've been promised these by RTD for Hung-Like-A-Donkey's Years.

He's been talking about doing something on older gay men ever since the end of Queer As Folk, and firmed things up way back in 2007.

First it was with the BBC, then Hollywood, blah blah, stuck in development hell. 

Anyway should be with us late next year.

So you can keep your ruddy Dr Who 50th anniversary specials and your Amercian "dramedy", Looking!

This image is from the Mirror. >>>

And seeing as they've just ripped off the press release, as did everyone else in medialand, I will too.

"Fifteen years after Queer As Folk exploded on to the screen, award-winning writer Russell T Davies is back with Cucumber and Banana – two new drama series for Channel 4 and E4 exploring the passions and pitfalls of 21st century gay life. Tofu, a factual web series, is an anarchic online guide to sex inspired by the dramas each week."

Cucumber - an 8 X 60’ series for Channel 4 - follows 46 year old Henry and his long-suffering boyfriend Lance. Life for Henry and Lance is comfortable and settled. But after the most disastrous date night in history - involving a death, a threesome, two police cars and the Glee Christmas Album - Henry's old life shatters, and his new life begins.

On E4, Banana (8 X 30’) follows the lives of characters orbiting around Henry in Cucumber. From young lesbian Scotty's first love, to 19 year old Dean's mysterious family secrets, Banana covers 50 shades of gay, and beyond.

With the same ferocious wit, startling honesty and heartfelt warmth that made Queer As Folka landmark series, Cucumber and Banana will explore the heartbreak and joy of modern sex lives - from gay to straight, and anything in between.* 

Tofu, meanwhile, extends the experience online with eight factual episodes navigating the landscape of 21st Century sex in its own inimitable way. Offering real people the chance to share their unique stories of sexual experiences, Tofu is an anarchic and entertaining look at sex.

* The Mirror put this in quotes and began; "An insider revealed..." 

Journalism!

Russell T Davies: Nowt So Queer As Facts

You couldn't write a feature called Happy 50th Birthday Russell T Davies: 50 Reasons Why Whovians And Telly Fans Love The Dr Who Producer without mentioning the seminal Queer as Folk, could you?
Well the Mirror tried their best today.
Here's the bit from their 50 facts about RTD where they mention QAF...

6. Murray Gold  
Everybody knows the stunningly distinctive theme, but Dr Who’s incidental music has on occasion been as infamous as it’s wobbling sets. Fortunately, Russell T has some talented friends. Having already worked with the writer on Queer as Folk, Casanova and the Second Coming, Murray Gold may have been a natural choice – but what an inspired one. Still with the show, he has produced a varied array of music for each episode perfectly matching Davies and other writers’ diverse stories.

Err, and that's it!
Quite a feat.
Whatever, happy fiftieth birthday Gay/Time Lord Russell, a true tellybox legend and one of the nicest people in showbiz.

PS I wonder what happened to Russell's TV series about a middle-aged gay couple, Cucumbers?

Correction Of The Day: Who?

The Sun.
The photo has now disappeared into the ether.

Dr Who: Yesterday's News Tomorrow!

Fagburn was wondering last week how long it would take for this story to break.
Christ, if I wanted to read something this old I'd read Gay Star "News".
Journalism - beats working!

Dr Who: WHAT!!!??

Revenge is a dish best served as “one I prepared earlier”, and the publication in May of a book by former Blue Peter editor Richard Marson is likely to prompt headlines as unfavourable for the BBC as those that surrounded his sacking in 2007 after the spate of scandals over faked viewer competitions, for which many felt he was made a scapegoat.

“JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Tuner” is the biography of the producer of Doctor Who from 1980-89, but while it has all the anorak you would expect, it also features startling amounts of dirty mac. An entire chapter is devoted to the sexual activities of Nathan-Turner and his partner and BBC colleague Gary Downie with teenage Doctor Who fans both on and off BBC premises, including Marson’s own tale of fleeing and hiding under an office desk at the age of 17 to evade the latter’s clutches.

Although Marson denies that Nathan-Turner was a paedophile (although his behaviour was illegal at the time given the unequal age of consent), he depicts Downie as an extremely predatory character and the pair’s abuse of the celebrity status that their jobs gave them as very much in the Savile mould.

“It’s helpful when you’re writing someone’s biography to have some understanding of the pressures they were under or the way in which they worked, because it gives you a greater insight,” Marson told science fiction magazine Starburst last month. “What I’ve tried to do is deconstruct or to explain how the BBC worked from within, because I think that’s something that’s very rarely understood.”

From Books & Bookmen in the current Private Eye. 

When the Daily Mail find out about this "NEW BBC DR WHO GAY PAEDO SCANDAL" - which knowing them will be sometime late next week - the world may well explode.

Thought For The Day: Steven Moffat

“It’s so unfair! Dippy, left-wing, PC, liberal me - and suddenly I’ve been given the sexual politics of Connery in Goldfinger but with neither the grace nor the looks. I’m ugly Sixties Bond - how much worse can you get?
“Yet I am not like that! It’s men I can’t stand. Gays and geeks are OK, but real men are awful. Those blokes who say: ‘How does your car hold the road?’ And you’re thinking ‘Gravity!’ And don’t ask me about football!”

Steven Moffat, in The Times, on accusations of male chauvinism and that his female characters were "tired old tropes."
Mr Moffat - writer of Dr Who and Sherlock, and a notorious heterosexual - is, alongside Russell T Davies and Mark Gatiss, part of the holy trinity of the BBC's Saturday evening TV.
Next Sunday he will receive a Special Award at the Baftas in recognition of his outstanding creative writing contribution to television.

Russell T Davies: Queer Resistance To The Cuts

"Don't start me on the Coalition goverment... You know their greatest trick is to appear as buffoons - and make everyone think they're funny. That Clegg and Cameron photo opportunity, at the bed, 'Oh, we’re all laughing'* – they're savage and evil people underneath it all.
"There is a great intelligence behind the Tory party that says 'let’s appear slightly bumbling and slightly buffoonish', while they're lethal as a laser underneath it all.
"I mean how marvellous was is it to launch those cuts on the licence fee on the day of all their austerity measures? So when I always presumed that when massive cuts cames to the BBC we'd all be storming the barricades, except if you do that when everyone's concerned about cuts to children and schools and health and roads it's very easy for people to put the BBC at the bottom of the list.
"[The BBC] can take cuts. There are cuts. But I don’t imagine these are the last of the cuts. This a precedent for cuts. Can you ever imagine it going back up again? No.
"And that is truly something of great cultural value. It's always very easy to say that a school is more important than a play, that a hospital is more important than a drama and that’s because we are talking a totally false language in which these things are comparable and one reduces the other. That's the language of economics, it simply doesn’t fit cultural life."

Russell T Davies, who can do no wrong etc etc, on BBC Radio 4's Front Row.
Russell also says the BBC watershed "is more stringent than ever" after Brandgate.

• The new series of Torchwood begins on BBC1 next month.
John Barrowman says; "I'm naked in one episode - I am full-on naked.
"I am bumping and grinding in this one. I am having man sex. The true die-hard fans know Jack is omnisexual - he likes men and women.
"People who tune into this series will just think Jack is gay, because he just has full-on man sex."
"It was really fun. One day, I get to shoot a helicopter and save the world, and a couple of days later, I get to have sex with a 24-year-old. [It's the most] perfect job in the world."
Good to hear.

* I guess RTD means this one.

Christopher And His Kind: Sign Of The Times

"Congratulations to Matilda Walter of London N1 for a potentially award-winning complaint to Radio Times about BBC2's bookish docudrama Christopher and His Kind. Instead of merely voicing the usual criticisms (Doctor Who having gay sex, a rerun of Cabaret without tunes, etc), she homed in on a central but overlooked issue: faced with a publicity still of 'semi-naked actors Matt Smith and Douglas Booth' sunbathing on lakeside decking, 'I couldn't take my eye off the photo. But the more I ogled, the more disappointed I became – Phillips decking screws used in a drama set before 1933?'"

From The Guardian's Media Monkey blog.

Christopher And His Kind: Christopher Who?

I like the way the cover of the new Radio Times - "Your actual quality guide..." - operates on the assumption that no-one will know nor care who this Christopher Isherwood bloke is that Matt Smith's playing in this TV drama, only that the Dr gets "Naked" and "sexy"...

Update: On Friday, several of the broadsheets profiled Smith and/or Isherwood.
Best headline: 'Nudity, Nazis and the Doctor' - The Daily Mail, natch.
The Mail's best question: "So IS he worried some Doctor Who fans might be horrified when they see their hero playing a dissolute boulevardier?"
Translation: "So IS he worried some Doctor Who fans might be horrified when they see their hero playing a poof?"
"No, because it’s just pretend," Matt Smith explained helpfully.

Russell T Davies: Touch Wood

"It’s like — you know, I could get on my soapbox and say how important it is to be, but it’s not a soapbox. It’s just simply who I am is a gay man in the world, given opportunities to write on all sorts of networks, which I’m immensely grateful for, and so it’s not like — it’s not like I include gay characters because it’s my duty or anything. It’s just my nature.
"It’s simply second-nature for me to do that. It would be rather odd if I didn’t do that. And I’ve been very lucky. I think you are very lucky when you are the man who created Queer as Folk because not many people ever dare stop you, having done that. I think, if you were a new writer, people could say “Let’s with a gayness.” But, actually, seriously, the world has moved on. That doesn’t happen anymore.
"I mean, this programming Captain Jack as great, big, swaggering bisexual lead character, people don’t blink about that anymore. Certainly, no one at Starz ever even raised an eyebrow. That’s last year, you know. It’s like — it’s just been healthy and progressive. And I think the bigger an audience you can get, you know — we want a brand-new audience on Starz. We want to increase the audience on BBC One. We must sell this to 57 countries, and they can all see that on the screen, and that’s got to be good."

The mighty Russell T Davies during a panel debate at the US Television Critics Association