"Actor: Amelia Bulmore"

• Gentleman Jack: Series 1-2 | DVD | (20/06/2022) from £17.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Gentleman Jack brings all the warmth, wit, and complexity of the writing of Sally Wainwright (BAFTA award-winning writer of Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax) to the remarkable true story of Anne Lister). With a spectacular cast including the BAFTA Award-Winning Suranne Jones as lesbian landowner Anne Lister. Halifax, Yorkshire, 1832. Charismatic, swashbuckling Anne Lister (determines to transform the fate of her ancestral home Shibden Hall. To do this, she must re-open her coal mines and marry well. But Anne has no intention of marrying a man. True to her own nature she plans to marry a woman and embarks on an epic, unconventional love story.

• Jam | DVD | (28/04/2003) from £24.99   |  Saving you £-5.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  With Jam, the TV follow-up to his Radio 1 series Blue Jam, Chris Morris focuses more on unease more than the satire of Brass Eye. Indeed, it's a moot point whether Jam can actually be categorised as comedy at all. Each sketch is steeped in a heavy brine of dark, ambient music (including Bark Psychosis, David Sylvian and Brian Eno), grainy imagery, fast-cut editing and slo-motion. Its mirthless, Kafka-esque scenarios feel like an attempt to morph into some new species of post-comedy that is more like the stuff of nightmares. The credits, in which Morris stalks the moving camera, uttering Lear-esque words of foreboding immediately announce that this "sketch show" is a galaxy apart from The Two Ronnies. The appalled look on actor Kevin Eldon's face in the opening sketch of the series, as a young couple invite him to endure being buggered by a mutual acquaintance ("I need a break"), sets the tone. Rape, chemotherapy, wanton urination--as a naked "Robert Kilroy-Silk" goes insane in a sketch full of detestation for the oleaginous TV presenter--and recurring sketches involving callously authoritarian NHS doctors, all go to make up these annals of the bizarre and perverse. Ultimately, Jam doesn't quite work, not on TV anyway. The repetition of the same, small cast over and over, broken up too briefly by Morris' own appearances (as a "country gentleman" living outside his house, for instance), coupled with the gruelling treatment of the sketch material makes for a psyche-probing, jaw-dropping experience--but in parts also a nullifying and strangely predictable one. Morris's "failures" are far more interesting than most people's successes. --David Stubbs

• I Am Not An Animal | DVD | (28/03/2005) from £6.98   |  Saving you £9.01 (129.08%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A group of animals (a horse cat sparrow monkey rat and dog) have all been given the power of speech and rational thought. They live in a luxurious 'club class' wing of a secret vivisection laboratory. Pampered and clothed unlike any lab animals in history fed vintage wine and exquisite food they are blissfully unaware of the real world outside. Until one cruel night when a gang of animal rights activists brutally liberate them into their so-called 'natural surroundings'... Epis