"Actor: Julia St John"

• The Brittas Empire - The Complete Series 2 | DVD | (20/10/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The ultimate depiction of workplace perdition has to be Whitbury Leisure Centre in The Brittas Empire, despite the later claim of The Office to the title. And while David Brent seems all too uncomfortably real, Chris Barrie's Gordon Brittas carried the gung-ho officiousness of mediocre middle-management to its surreal conclusion. The Brittas Empire could never quite make up its mind if it was a quasi-realistic sitcom or a fantasy comedy, and it's this uneasy mixture that invites you to question whether there's anything terribly funny about unplanned single parenthood, childcare problems, assault in the workplace and women who are addicted to prescription drugs (see also Waiting for God) because of their partners' behaviour. Then, just as you're pondering all this, Brittas comes out with another mouthful of managerial psychobabble that makes you realise that only this kind of tragi-comic exaggeration is robust enough to stand up to Barrie's monstrous creation. This second series treads a fine line between the merely bleak and the really rather nasty with exquisite precision. It opens with the news that Brittas has been killed abroad in an industrial accident, prompting his tranquillizer-addled wife to mourn him for less time than it takes her to remarry--except, of course, that Brittas is alive and well. Along the way, receptionist Carole attempts to murder Brittas with a JCB when she mistakenly thinks he's assaulted her baby, which she keeps in a cupboard under her desk. On the DVD: The Brittas Empire, Series 2 carries all seven episodes on two discs, together with several extras including a gallery, a profile and a Brittas Management Quiz (don't ask!). --Roger Thomas

• The Prince And Me | DVD | (25/07/2005) from £9.16   |  Saving you £9.83 (107.31%)   |  RRP £18.99

  Julia Stiles stars as a medical student who falls for an incognito student prince in this modern take on a fairy tale love story.

• The Trench | DVD | (15/05/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Set in the 48 hours leading up to the catastrophic battle of the Somme this is the intense story of young men at war as seen through the eyes of 17-year old Billy Macfarlane (Nicholls). As the boys wait for the attack alternately excited and terrified this group of nave soldiers is forced to confront the reality of the enemy as the suspense reaches breaking point. When Billy's platoon is ordered to go with the first wave of attackers the awful truth of what they're about to un

• The Brittas Empire - The Complete Series 4 | DVD | (19/07/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A fourth series of leisure centre management mishaps with Gordon Brittas. Episodes comprise: 1. Not A Good Day... 2. The Christening 3. Biggles Tells A Lie 4. Mr Brittas Changes Trains 5. Playing With Fire 6. Shall We Dance? 7. The Chop 8. High Noon

• The Wilde Alliance - The Complete Series | DVD | (03/08/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  The Wilde Alliance: The Complete Series

• The Great McGonagall | DVD | (09/02/2004) from £4.96   |  Saving you £8.03 (161.90%)   |  RRP £12.99

  William Topaz McGonagall (Milligan) is an unemployed Scottish weaver who decides to devote his life to poetry. Falling in love with Queen Victoria (here played by Peter Sellers) he donates his major poetic works to her and despite many rejections dreams of one day becoming Poet Laureate...

• Fathers' Day | DVD | (25/09/1998) from £5.49   |  Saving you £8.50 (60.80%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Billy Crystal plays the straight man to neurotic Robin Williams when these two very different individuals join forces to find a runaway teenager. Both, you see, have been told they are the boy's father by Nastassja Kinski, with whom each had once been involved. This Disney production is based on the more humorous French farce, Les Compères, by Francis Veber (who cowrote this adaptation). It has its moments as breezy entertainment, but the plot is sloppy enough to seem more like slapstick than sophisticated comedy. The gags are contrived, and it fails to unfold with believability, or grace. More interesting than the writing are the performances, as Crystal brings surprising depth to his cynical lawyer and Williams is exceptionally fine-tuned as a suicidal and dippy writer with a very kind heart. --Rochelle O'Gorman, Amazon.com --This text refers to the VHS edition of this video

• Hannah And Her Sisters | Blu Ray | (20/02/2017) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  One of Woody Allen's best-loved films, this won three richly deserved Oscars* (for Michael Caine, Dianne Wiest and the screenplay), and is a joy from start to perfectly judged finish. Hannah (Mia Farrow) is a devoted wife, loving mother and successful actress. She's also the emotional backbone of the family, and her sisters Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest) depend on this stability while also resenting it because they can't help but compare Hannah's seemingly perfect life with theirs. But with her husband Elliot (Michael Caine) becoming increasingly interested in Lee, it's clear that Hannah might have problems of her own. An unusually strong supporting cast includes Allen himself as Hannah's existentially conflicted ex-husband and Max von Sydow as a perfectionist artist, but it's Caine who practically steals the film as a middle-aged man behaving like a lovesick teenager. It also has some of Allen's greatest one-liners, with a philosophical discussion about the nature of good and evil getting shot down with How should I know why there were Nazis? I don't even know how the can opener works.

• Before Women Had Wings | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £8.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Bird' Jackson is a young girl whose life with her parents is painful and frightening. She turns to her reclusive neighbour Miss Zora played by Oprah Winfrey to escape the harsh realities of her home life and it is through their friendship that Bird learns to dream of a better life. But Miss Zora knows that Bird cannot survive on dreams alone and there is only one way to save her.

• Impromptu | DVD | (01/03/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  There are Victorian country-house shenanigans aplenty in Impromptu: novelist George Sand (Judy Davis, affected but pretty charming) has eyes for Franz Liszt's young protégé Chopin (Hugh Grant, solid as always, but burdened by a silly Polish accent and a script that never lets him stretch out), but various lovers, jealous rivals, and Chopin's own overdeveloped sense of propriety conspire to confound her. Impromptu is witty but overlong--probably 20 minutes of hijinks and repartee, not to mention several completely gratuitous and redundant characters, could have been sliced from the film. Davis plays Sand as an impetuous, overgrown tomboy, outraging her genteel hosts by wearing pants, chomping cigars, and falling off horses; her coterie of artist-friends assure us, in a series of naked plot devices, that she nonetheless has a heart of gold. It's all good silly fun, and about as feminist as your average Def Leppard video--the other two developed female characters are ugly stereotypes: a featherbrained, feckless social climber (Emma Thompson, who once again proves she's up for anything) and a spiteful, back-stabbing shrew (the ever-capable Bernadette Peters). Director James Lapine clearly belongs to the Dr Quinn: Medicine Woman school of historical accuracy, so don't expect to learn anything about the period or the artists themselves. --Miles Bethany

• The Fourth Protocol | DVD | (25/07/2005) from £13.90   |  Saving you £-7.91 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  On July 1 1968 America Britain and Russia signed a treaty to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The powers then added four extra clauses. The most secret of them was and remains the final. One winter the Chairman of the KGB hatches a plan to breach this Fourth Protocol and destroy NATO. He sends an agent Major Petrofsky (Pierece Brosnan) to assemble the operation. It is now up to MI6 agent John Preston (Michael Caine) who now must race against an unknown deadline to stop him and his devasting mission. Based on the novel by the best-selling author Frederick Forsyth.

• The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner | DVD | (14/04/2003) from £39.99   |  Saving you £-20.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Following the success of Karel Reisz's 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' Alan Sillitoe adapted another of his works for the screen this time a short story of a disillusioned teenager rebelling against the system to make Tony Richardson's 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' one of the great British films of the 1960s. Newcomer Tom Courtenay is compelling as the sullen defiant Colin refusing to follow his dying father into a factory job railing against the capitalist bosses and preferring to make a living from petty thieving. Arrested for burglary and sent to borstal Colin discovers a talent for cross-country running earning him special treatment from the governor (Michael Redgrave) and the chance to redeem himself from anti-social tearaway to sports day hero. With Colin a favourite to win against a local public school tensions build as the day approaches...

• O | DVD | (18/07/2005) from £4.82   |  Saving you £5.17 (107.26%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Shakespeare's classic tragedy "Othello" gets a contemporary makeover as a teen drama set in an exclusive private US school.

• Rasputin | DVD | (24/07/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Prince Alexei heir to the last Tsar is a hemophiliac. The Tsarina is persuaded to allow a mysterious monk Rasputin to use his powers of healing on the Prince. Against the wishes of the Tsar Rasputin tends to the young Prince - with frighteningly successful results. So begins a relationship which ended in Rasputin's murder and the eventual downfall of Imperial Russia...

• Conspiracy Theory / Payback | DVD | (24/04/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £10.99

  Conspiracy Theory: New York cab driver and conspiracy buff Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) knows about the secret movers shakers and assassins who really control things. Trying to put Justice Department attorney Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts) in the know he's run out of her of office. Soon both will run for their lives. The two stars conspire for suspense romance and twists that click like a rush-hour taximeter. (Dir. Richard Donner 1997 Cert. 15) Payback: Mel Gibson po

• Saturday Night Fever / Save The Last Dance / Footloose / Flashdance | DVD | (18/10/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  The Definitive Dance Collection! 4 Discs of pure dancing magic... Footloose: Teenager Ren MacCormack sends ripples through Bomont a small Midwestern town that could stand some shaking up when he arrives from Chicago with his mother Ethel to settle with her relatives. The adults tend to view him with suspicion as a possible contaminant from the outer world. Some of his male peers eye him as a threat and most of the girls just plain eye him. It's a tough time for Ren

• The Brittas Empire - The Complete Series 1 | DVD | (21/07/2003) from £12.99   |  Saving you £7.00 (53.89%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Broadcast between 1991 and 1997, The Brittas Empire is a sitcom set in Whitbury New Town Leisure Centre. It stars Chris Barrie as Gordon Brittas, the prattish, blazered manager who remains loudly oblivious to the fact that his high-handed efforts at running the place result in utter calamity. As his gin-supping, nervous wreck of a wife observes, he thinks he's the oil that lubricates the machine but in reality he's "a bag of grit". This first series introduces Brittas, whose arrival at the new Centre prompts a rash of resignations as his petty and pedantic managerial methods constantly rebound on him. Mishaps in these episodes include a malfunctioning set of automatic doors, a disastrous wedding in the pool and a lost baby. Somehow, however, Brittas' strange sense of idealism keeps him bobbing up as all others sink into despair. The Brittas Empire could either be seen as a satire on the new tier of superfluous middle-management types who flourished in Tory Britain, or a 90s update of the old stereotype of the bureaucratic buffoon. Compared to, say, Alan Partridge, Brittas seems a bit broad and one-dimensional, a sketch-show character stretched beyond its limits. The rest of the cast don't offer much in the way of resistance or support and Brittas very swiftly becomes very annoying. Despite all problems, however, The Brittas Empire was an immense success, attracting over eight-million viewers at its peak. On the DVD: The Brittas Empire include some perfunctory, text-only items, including a Chris Barrie biography and a Brittas Fitness Quiz, as well as a sketch performed at the Royal Variety Performance of 1996, in which Brittas reveals himself as an enthusiast for conformity with EEC regulations. --David Stubbs

• First Knight | DVD | (01/10/1999) from £5.70   |  Saving you £0.29 (5.09%)   |  RRP £5.99

  1995 had already seen the box-office success of sword-wielding heroes in Rob Roy and Braveheart when along came this glossy revision of the Arthurian legend, in which Lady Guinevere (Julia Ormond) is torn between her love for the noble King Arthur (Sean Connery) and the passionate knight Sir Lancelot (Richard Gere). As the story opens, Guinevere's lands are under attack by the evil knight Malagant (Ben Cross), and she must choose between marriage to Arthur and the security of Camelot, or encouraging the affections of Lancelot, who has heroically rescued her from a potentially lethal attack. Anyone looking for meticulous medieval authenticity won't find it here, but director Jerry Zucker (Ghost) keeps the action moving with exuberant spirit and glorious production values. Even if you don't completely believe Richard Gere as a somewhat too-contemporary Lancelot, the performances of Ormond and especially Connery are effortlessly appealing. --Jeff Shannon

• Heartless | DVD | (04/04/2005) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-3.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  Angus Deayton and Simone Lahbib star in the original director's cut of this heart-warming comedy drama. Harry Holland (Deayton) is a charming yet ruthless and hedonistic barrister. Struck down in the middle of a major trial by a rare cardiac condition he is rushed to hospital where he wakes up three weeks later after a successful heart transplant operation. To Harry's dismay he has changed into a different man questioning the morals of his career and unable to enjoy his old bachelor

• The Brittas Empire - The Complete Series 7 | DVD | (23/05/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Gordon Brittas goes from strength to strength. Despite his failed endeavour and despite the endeavours of both his staff and his wife to depose him Whitbury Leisure Centre continues to thrive. Brittas continues to dream up new schemes to promote and improve the centre including a bungee jump sequential staff reviews and computerisation - all with the usual Brittas diplomacy aplomb and mayhem. Julie heavily pregnant embraces the bungee jump whereas Tim tries everything he ca