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The internet has many uses. These days, a common one is to provide respite from the monotony of the day with videos of cute animals. Now the BBC has leapt onto the bandwagon with this rather adorable viral of The Wizard of Oz as played by dogs.

Tying in with Over the Rainbow’s hunt for a canine actor to play Toto in the West End, the viral is tapping into the Oz fever that abounds at the moment as Andrew Lloyd Webber also continues his search for his perfect Dorothy. This three-minute short imagines a doggy version of the classic film and sees Dorothy played by a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel transported by a tornado to the mysterious land of Oz. It’s a world where the yellow brick road is made from yellow dog biscuits and the flowers are dog treats.

Urged by fellow spaniel puppy munchkins, Dorothy heads off to see the wizard and find her way home. On her travels she meets the Scarecrow (a dog in a battered tricorn hat), the Cowardly Lion (a dog wearing a mane) and the Tin Dog (who’s not a real dog at all but made from tin cans).

Naturally the baddies are played by cats – with a dark and sinister moggy as the Wicked Witch of the West and winged Siameses as the flying monkeys.

Original article

Lucy Davis isn’t your typical glamorous Hollywood star. But a Hollywood star is exactly what she is these days. Once fondly known to us as Dawn from The Office or Hayley Jordan from The Archers, she now lives in LA and has had roles in such glossy TV series as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Ugly Betty and Californication. But today the 37-year-old actress is looking decidedly unglamorous on set in Leeds filming Married Single Other, a new romantic comedy series for ITV1 in which she plays Lillie, a woman who has been in a relationship for 16 years but has always refused to marry her boyfriend (played by Shaun Dooley).

There’s certainly no evidence of Botox, Hollywood’s favourite anti-ageing treatment, at work on her face and she’s sporting a black eye – or rather, very realistic-looking make-up which gives her a black eye.

But although she hasn’t morphed into an identikit Hollywood actress, complete with breast implants and facelift, she remains susceptible to the judgement of the tabloids when it comes to her looks. She vehemently insists that she doesn’t let it influence her, however. ‘I struggle because I love food and sometimes I can’t stop eating,’ she says. ‘If I’m slimmer I feel better about myself but I don’t lose weight for anybody else or for a magazine.’

She claims that the press often prints things that are inaccurate: ‘I remember seeing an article called “How I lost my Christmas weight”. It came out in the second week of January [last year]. They showed some picture of me from literally about five years ago when I was at my biggest and then they showed another when I was at my thinnest. Neither of which had happened since Christmas. That’s wrong. I don’t think it’s very responsible if people who want to lose weight are made to think, “She’s done that in three weeks.” Of course I haven’t, I’d be dead.’

Fortunately she’s able to take a far more sensible approach to maintaining her weight and says she doesn’t fall victim to the dramatic diets that seduce many other starlets. ‘Billy Connolly basically said to me, ‘Eat less, move more’ and I think that makes sense,’ she says.

Her weight and appearance aren’t the only topics Davis has found strewn through the newspapers. The Daily Mail has published articles claiming that her marriage to fellow actor Owain Yeoman is in jeopardy – again something Davis finds frustrating. ‘There’d be a picture of me walking the dogs all alone but Owain’s actually right there with me,’ she says. ‘They’ve either not taken a picture of him or they’ve cut him out. I’m always followed [by the paparazzi] and I hate it.’

Davis married Yeoman in 2006 in a lavish wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral. It came less than a year after the couple got together. Before then, Davis had been in a 13-year on-off relationship with actor and writer Richard Manson and sworn she would never marry. ‘I loved him to pieces but I just never thought I’d want to marry him ever. I don’t know why,’ she admits. ‘Then I met Owain and within a few weeks it was like, “Yep, brilliant, done.” It was really quick.’

In fact her first relationship is not unlike that of Lillie, whom she plays in Married Single Other. Lillie is a character somewhat tougher than Davis’s most famous role – timid Dawn, the receptionist in The Office. ‘Lillie doesn’t want to get married because she’s seen so many horrendous examples through the shelter she works at for abused women,’ she says.

In terms of research for her role, Davis says she has only got as far as ‘Googling’. Unlike a lot of actors she doesn’t seem to take herself too seriously, either in life or in work. ‘I don’t have this big yen to do theatre,’ she admits, ‘which I really shouldn’t say, I know.’

In fact when she was asked what her ambitions were on her first day of drama college she found herself the only person willing to confess she wanted to work in television and films. ‘There was just this tumbleweed. The woman who’s the head of school was really disapproving and said, “In the meantime how are you going to pay your bills?” I was 18 and confused that I’d given a wrong answer. I really enjoyed the theatre training but I’m just not very good at it.’

Despite not gaining experience in the theatre first, Davis managed to forge a career in TV and films (she was in the hugely successful Shaun of the Dead), and without the help of her famous father, the comedian Jasper Carrott. ‘When I left drama college it was my thing. No one was going to know who my dad was for quite a long time,’ she says. In fact, when Davis was 18, a friend gave her the chance to read a line on Carrott and Robert Powell’s Nineties TV series The Detectives – and Davis didn’t even tell him she would be on set. ‘On the day I told no one. I sat with the other actors all day,’ she says. But that hasn’t stopped people presuming that she has benefited from nepotism. ‘I remember doing Pride and Prejudice [on BBC One in 1995] and my friend saying, “Oh that was nice of your dad to get you that.” Which I just found really odd.’

It’s not a mistake anyone would make nowadays. Davis’s next big film role is as the love interest in Some Guy Who Kills People, the new Hollywood horror comedy that’s been executively produced by John Landis (director of The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London). It’s certainly not something you imagine her father would have had much influence in. Dawn from The Office, it seems, is breaking Hollywood all on her own.

Original article

According to Robert Llewellyn (Kryten in Red Dwarf and the former presenter of Scrapheap Challenge), the idea for Car Pool first came to him a few years ago when he filmed himself and the comedian David Baddiel when they were driving through London. By January this year he’d bought three mini cameras to put in his car and began to call in a few favours from various celebrity friends.

The premise is simple. Llewellyn gives his guest a “lift” through London and they chat as though it was any normal car journey.

The footage is then edited together into produce an entertaining 15-20 minute video which is placed on his website: www.llewtube.com.

It’s a project that Llewellyn runs off his own bat and, despite only having shot 30 videos so far, has included some impressive names.

His Red Dwarf co-stars Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules and Craig Charles have taken part, as has Peep Show star David Mitchell, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. They are mixed in with interesting non-celebrities such as Charlie McDonnell, a teenager who has made his name by putting videos of himself on YouTube.

A new video is added each week and the project has gathered quite a following with over 1,000 fans on its Facebook page. Llewellyn also announces each new video on his Twitter page.

Watch at Llewtube. You can also follow Robert Llewellyn on Twitter.

Original article

First came Doctor Who. Then came Torchwood, the grown-up spin-off starring John Barrowman. Then came the children’s TV series The Sarah Jane Adventures. And now the BBC’s sci-fi bods have commissioned a brand new spin-off: a series of six animated Doctor Who mini-episodes of seven minutes each featuring the voices of David Tennant, Georgia Moffett, David Warner, Stuart Milligan and Clarke Peters. From regular Who scriptwriter Phil Ford, Dreamland is a 3D HD animation (which should please both the geekiest of Doctor Who fans and the children who barely remember the time when animations were drawn with pens).

The new adventure sees the Tardis touch down in the New Mexican desert where the Time Lord befriends a young waitress Cassie (Moffett) and her friend Jimmy (Tim Howar). But when the Doctor activates a mysterious alien artefact the US army escorts him to Area 51 – also known as “Dreamland”. Because the team is only using computers to create each episode the producers have packed in plenty of explosions and monsters that wouldn’t be possible in a live-action episode.

A new instalment will be available daily on the Doctor Who website from tomorrow and the full 45 minutes will be broadcast on BBC Two on December 5.

Original article

Of all the things that Ben Fogle expected to sacrifice on the way to the South Pole, he never thought his nose would be one of them. ‘For a TV presenter, a frostbitten nose isn’t great,’ he says. Fortunately Fogle had handwarmers with him – gel pads that use a chemical reaction to create heat – which he strapped over it. ‘It looked comical,’ he says, ‘but the doctor said that if I hadn’t done it I would have lost part of my nose.’

Along with the Olympic rower and Telegraph contributor James Cracknell and Ed Coates, a doctor from Bristol, Fogle was competing in the Amundsen South Pole Race. It took the trio 18 days to ski across 474 miles of frozen wilderness, finally arriving at the Pole on 22 January. The Pole Race, which was widely covered by the media, was the first race across the Antarctic since Robert Scott’s famous expedition in 1911, when the British explorer was beaten to the Pole by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team, and then perished on the journey back.

Fogle, Cracknell and Coates were hoping to turn history on its head and beat a Norwegian team which was one of the other five taking part. On Thin Ice, a five-part documentary series on BBC Two, tells the story of their expedition.

Like Scott and Amundsen, the trio had to endure terrible conditions. At times the temperature dropped as low as -58F (-50C). The team-members had to ski 16 hours a day, with each pulling a sled weighing 11st. And Fogle wasn’t the only one to suffer from the elements. Despite being physically fitter than Fogle when the race began, Cracknell came off worse. His blisters became so severe he developed ulcers underneath them. ‘At the end of the day James would remove his socks and it just smelt of decaying flesh,’ says Fogle. ‘I used to retch. It was terrible.’

On top of his excruciating blisters, Cracknell struggled with an illness that could have jeopardised the entire mission: pneumonia. At the halfway checkpoint, at which every team is forced to take a day’s rest, the doctors were considering pulling him out of the race. ‘Not being able to finish would have been the worst thing,’ he says. ‘Luckily my condition improved over the 24 hours.’

Initially, the team were also worried about a rule which dictates that anyone who visits Antarctica must take away everything they bring with them – including their own excrement. According to Fogle’s calculations ‘if we had to pick up all our human waste we would have ended up pulling half a ton of frozen faeces to the South Pole.’ Thankfully, there’s a loophole allowing those on a lengthy expedition to bury it.

To survive the monotony of their journey, skiing single-file through the beautiful but bleak landscape with only an iPod for company (although in Fogle’s case his broke on the trek to the start line), Cracknell and Fogle clearly had to be a tightly-knit team. They were helped by the fact that they’ve done this sort of thing before: in the 2006 BBC series Through Hell and High Water the pair took part in

a three-month boat race across the Atlantic, in which they rowed naked to avoid their clothes chafing. When they describe their partnership it almost sounds like a marriage. ‘When we rowed across the Atlantic we didn’t even know each other,’ says Fogle. ‘After that we were friends. Now I consider James one of my best friends. He’s the only person in the world who I have arguments with -we actually have domestics.’ Fogle is now godfather to Cracknell’s second child, a baby girl named Kiki whom he had with his wife, the TV presenter Beverley Turner, in March.

Both Fogle and Cracknell began their public careers in active ways. Fogle, 35, found fame on the BBC’s reality show Castaway 2000 in which he and 35 others were marooned on a remote Scottish island for a year. Cracknell, 37, was a member of Britain’s gold medal-winning coxless four at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and then in Athens four years later.

Fogle confesses that his adventurous streak is now becoming an addiction. ‘James pointed out that I’ve spent more Christmases with him than I have with my wife,’ he says. ‘We agree that going on these adventures is quite selfish. He left Bev six months pregnant and I left my wife after she’d just gone through a miscarriage.’

In fact, Fogle’s wife Marina miscarried just a day before he departed for the Pole. ‘I certainly wouldn’t have done that if she hadn’t given me her blessing,’ he says. ‘I’ll forever be grateful.’

What’s more, Fogle had only just finished treatment for a potentially fatal flesh-eating virus that he caught in Peru while filming his BBC series Extreme Dreams. He was given the all clear but the wound began to open up in Antarctica and on his return he underwent a course of chemotherapy.

Clearly the team were prepared to do just about anything to rise to what Fogle describes as ‘the ultimate challenge’. But despite their Herculean efforts, history unfortunately repeated itself: the Norwegians beat them to the Pole. ‘We couldn’t have pushed ourselves harder,’ says Fogle, who remains satisfied in what they achieved.

So after going through all the pain and privations, one wonders if the pair will be able to stomach watching it on television. ‘I only watched the first couple of episodes of Hell and High Water and just thought “God, am I that much of a pain to be with?”’ admits Cracknell.

Fogle, on the other hand, will be tuning in. ‘I’ll be watching,’ he says, ‘but from behind a pillow. We reached the Pole on our hands and knees. I think when people see it they will be slack-jawed.’

Original article

It’s the opening show of the new series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and guest host Stephen Fry is redoing a line. He’s managed to introduce the regular panellist Barry Cryer as “Brian”, which, when he’s reminded of his mistake, brings titters from the live audience and from this evening’s star guest-panellist Victoria Wood, who’s making her debut on the programme.

Fry is understandably nervous. He’s sitting in the place of the show’s deeply admired former chairman Humphrey Lyttelton, who died last year.

Lyttelton had presented Radio 4’s determinedly silly panel game – the self-declared “antidote” to more standard examples of the genre – since its inception in 1972. His deadpan presenting style was thought intrinsic to the success of the show, and after hearing the news of his death, the Clue team did not know if the programe would return at all. “We agreed to take a year out and let us all get over [his death] in our own ways,” says regular panellist Graeme Garden.

But despite concerns that it wouldn’t be the same without him, the BBC was inundated by requests from the public for the show to come back. “Literally thousands of emails came in,” says Barry Cryer. “We were flooded.”

So back it has come, with temporary guest presenters until a permanent replacement can be found (both Cryer and Garden are tight-lipped on who that could be). When tickets for the new six-part series were released, with announcements that Stephen Fry, Jack Dee and Rob Brydon would each be presenting two programmes, they were snapped up within minutes. The guest panellists weren’t even announced yet – Wood’s appearance (she holds her own despite saying this week in an interview the Radio Times that panel shows are too “male-dominated”) is a complete surprise.

It’s a Sunday evening in April and we’re in Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. On stage are Garden, Cryer, Wood, regular panellist Tim Brooke-Taylor, Fry and, next to him, an empty chair for scorekeeper Samantha (who isn’t real). Two shows are recorded in one evening, with each taking about 45 minutes.

Fry is looking particularly dapper in a tuxedo and sparkly waistcoat as tonight’s recording falls on the same night as the Bafta Television Awards and he’s dashing off to the dinner later. He informs us that his sister is going to text him should he win any of his three categories. Sadly, no text arrives.

The games start quickly, with each panellist reading from a script – the show began life improvised but is no longer. As always with Clue, there’s plenty of innuendo to keep the audience amused. During a round in which they have to guess the original wording of quotes by the socialite Paris Hilton, Brooke-Taylor is given “I don’t have sex unless I’m…”. “Awake,” he quickly offers. “The opposite of me,” remarks Fry.

More are found in the return of Mornington Crescent – the nonsense game in which participants always arrive at the name of the underground station – which is welcomed by loud cheers. The panellists are now joined by a new “machine” from which a robotic voice says the names of Tube stations. But, of course, the machine is faulty and it scrambles the names of stations. It barks rude-sounding hybrids such as “Shepherd’s Cock”, “Queen’s Bush” and “Parson’s Balls” – leaving the audience giggling like naughty children.

But as much as Clue is about harmless fun, a few taunts do fly about, with the main focus being Fry and his fondness for Twitter, the social networking site. Indeed, Fry, at the end of the show’s first half, makes a spontaneous attempt to get the audience involved with the whole Twitter phenomenon.

“We’re not keeping you from the bar are we?” he asks the crowd, as he eats into their 20-minute interval time.

“Only Barry,” yells a spectator, to a round of laughs.

The incident is typical of the whole evening: the audience seem particularly supportive and fond of the team on stage, as if to compensate for the dark cloud hanging over them.

“The mood of mourning for Humph was changed into a very warm feeling,” Cryer says later. “Like he was standing in the wings.”

Original article

Sometimes men really do have it easier than women. Stephen Mangan and Sharon Horgan are on the set of their new sitcom and while Mangan gets to wander around in a comfy-looking pair of trainers, Horgan is balancing on top of a pair of giant heels. Halfway through a scene she’s forced to change one pair for another. By the time we sit down to talk she’s swapped to a pair of furry flat boots.

‘Oh my God, they were so bad,’ she smiles. ‘I’m normally OK in heels but they were horrific. They were too big for me so I was having to dig my toes into them to keep them on.’

Horgan – who won a British Comedy Award for Best Television Comedy Actress in December for her part in BBC3’s Pulling – is starring in Free Agents, which starts on Channel 4 this Friday. It’s about two lovelorn talent agents. She’s Helen, a woman in her thirties who’s recovering from the recent death of her fiancé. Mangan plays Alex, a divorcee who is sleeping on the sofa in his office. The two have had a drunken one-night stand and he’s now stalking her around the agency where they work, trying to persuade her to be his girlfriend. As Mangan says: ‘It’s a bit will-they-won’t-they. With a lot more won’t-they.’

The two stars originally got together to play these roles in 2007 for Channel 4’s Comedy Showcase. After it got good reviews, Channel 4 commissioned a six-part series.

Anthony Head (Little Britain, The Invisibles) stars as their boss, a sleazy middle-aged man who owns the talent agency. Those of a sensitive disposition should be warned that the character is something of a potty mouth.

‘Every day I have just garbage to say,’ he says with a giggle. ‘It’s extremely blue dialogue but very liberating.’

This comes in spite of the ongoing debate about the standards of taste in broadcasting, prompted by the lewd messages that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross left on the voicemail of Andrew Sachs last year. The week before last there was even an investigation by Panorama into whether there’s too much swearing on television today.

Mangan says Ross and Brand went ‘over the line’ but adds that he doesn’t wish their behaviour to limit the freedom of other comedians.

‘If people don’t want to watch a programme with lots of swearing in then they shouldn’t watch this one,’ he says. ‘I’m sure they’ll put a nice warning at the beginning of it. But I hope we don’t get into a period of sanitisation. People should be allowed to cause offence. We’re depicting a world in which, according to our esteemed writer [Chris Niel], who once was an agent himself, this sort of language was the norm.’

We’re used to seeing Mangan playing foul-mouthed characters (particularly the arrogant Dr Guillaume Secretan in Channel 4’s comedy series Green Wing). But in Free Agents, he’s also a romantic lead. ‘Well, sort of,’ he says, then gestures to the mop of dark brown curls on his head. ‘It’s a bit hard to play a romantic lead with hair like this.’

Although Mangan’s best known for his comedy parts he’s never been a stand-up: ‘Oh God no. I’m terrified,’ he says quickly. After graduating from Rada in 1994, he first worked in theatre and played several West End roles, something which he has continued. While filming Free Agents in the daytime he’s also dashing off to appear in The Norman Conquests at the Old Vic theatre in the evening. And all this with a one-year-old child as well.

‘My wife’s being very heroic,’ he says. ‘I put earplugs in every night and wake up every morning and ask how the night’s gone. Because I think that otherwise it would push me over the edge.’

Horgan, meanwhile, is busy taking care of her four-month-old daughter, and doing only one acting job at a time at the moment. She admits Mangan probably has it tougher.

‘We had my daughter down on set a lot and she’s just an easy baby,’ she says. ‘It would have been a lot harder had she been anything other than the good little girl she is.’ That said, she does confess to ‘nearly getting caught expressing [milk] many times’. Not something Mangan has to worry about.

Children are not the only thing that Horgan and Mangan have in common. Both also had a traditional upbringing. He went to an all-boys’ boarding school where he says he inadvertently had his first crack at comedy playing Beauty in Beauty and the Beast aged nine. Horgan attended a Catholic school in Ireland where she was taught by nuns. ‘It definitely sets you up with a sort of queer view of the world,’ she says. ‘It’s weird being taught by nuns, it does give you a slightly quirky outlook.’

Though she spent her twenties ‘not really doing much’, in 2001 she co-wrote a series of comedy sketches which won the BBC New Comedy award. With her writing partner, the playwright Dennis Kelly, she then wrote and starred in the Bafta-nominated Pulling. But after two series, the BBC surprisingly cancelled this wry comedy about three thirty-somethings’ amorous travails. The last episode will be a special that she and Kelly are working on at the moment.

Horgan laughs pointedly when asked why it wasn’t recommissioned. ‘Well, basically what they said was they couldn’t keep recommissioning because it doesn’t leave much room for any new series,’ she says. ‘But I think we just didn’t fit in with the BBC3 thing any more. I mean, it was the most watched show by females on the channel and we really wanted to do another series. But you have to take it on the chin.’

Original article

Hugh Bonneville and Janet McTeer have teamed up again, and Bonneville, for one, is delighted. And not just for the usual actorly reasons that they ‘love working together’. In fact, the main reason Bonneville enjoys working with McTeer is her height. ‘Janet is 6’1,’ the 6’2″ actor says. ‘Which is great because I don’t have to bend down all the time.’ High praise indeed.

The pair are reunited in BBC1′s fast-paced new thriller Hunter, in which they star as Detective Superintendent Iain Barclay and his DS Amy Foster. Viewers first met Barclay and Foster in BBC1′s Bafta-nominated drama Five Days, which pulled in 6.7 million viewers when it aired in 2007. Hunter is more than just a sequel, however. It has a new writer, Mick Ford (Ashes to Ashes), and is set over two episodes rather than five. As Bonneville explains: ‘This is like a first cousin of Five Days but it’s not trying to recreate or diminish it. It’s not Five Days Lite. It’s taking a successful format and giving it a new life.’

Bonneville (Notting Hill), 45, reprises his role of the dogged DSI, with McTeer (The Governor), 47, playing that familiar cop drama character: the deputy pulled out of retirement. In Five Days the pair investigated the disappearance of a young mother and her children. In Hunter they’re reunited to lead the hunt for two seven-year-old boys who go missing on the same day. The two incidents appear to be unrelated until photos are emailed to the police of both boys apparently asleep in identical poses, wrapped in white matching blankets. An extremist group is threatening to murder them both unless their demands are met.

Barclay is finding his inexperienced police team increasingly unreliable. In a bid to whip them into shape he summons Foster, his friend and former deputy, who is lazing partially inebriated in the bath when she gets the call. However, McTeer insists that Foster is not an addict: ‘She drinks a lot but she’s not an alcoholic. She smokes; she drinks a lot of coffee. They’re all adrenaline junkies. But she’s a cool customer – very tough.’

This makes her markedly different from McTeer herself, who admits she’s not strong enough to do Foster’s job in real life. ‘I think I’m too soppy,’ she says. ‘I think by definition my emotions are near the surface otherwise I wouldn’t be able to act.’

Bonneville, by contrast, thinks he’d be ‘not bad’ as a detective. ‘But I’m a classic bloke. I can open the fridge and not see the butter when I’m staring right at it,’ he says. ‘Similarly Barclay’s great passion is astronomy; his talent is to see order in the chaos. I look up at the stars and can’t see a pattern but he sees constellations. Foster picks up on things which are blindingly obvious, though sometimes Barclay can’t spot details when they’re under his nose. That’s what makes them a good team.’

The case certainly requires all Barclay and Foster’s skill and intuition. Both face tough ethical decisions about whether to accede to the kidnappers’ demands and thereby risk the hostages’ lives. But unlike slick US crime dramas such as CSI, in which Machiavellian baddies commit crimes with clinical efficiency, the kidnappers in Hunter, like the cops pursuing them, are all too human. They make mistakes of their own and it’s thanks to these that Barclay and his hard-nosed deputy start to work out who’s behind the abductions.

Although McTeer says she has little in common with Foster, she has played a string of similarly tough female roles in dramas such as the ITV1 prison series The Governor and the period film Songcatcher. Her leading role in the US indie film Tumbleweeds, a heart-warming tale of the struggles of a single mother, earned her an Oscar nomination (and won her a Golden Globe) in 2000. Hollywood was banging down McTeer’s door to offer her juicy roles but she decided to return to the UK immediately afterwards. So why did she come back so soon?

‘I think that was a stupid move on my part,’ she admits. ‘The whole movie publicity tour was so gruelling, and at the time my agent was on a break. He would have been, “Come on McTeer! We have to do that, we have to do this!” But I just thought, “I can’t do this. I like it at home.”‘

Thankfully McTeer’s career continued to flourish back in the UK, both on stage and on television. Last year she starred as Mrs Dashwood in the BBC1′s superb adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

Indeed Jane Austen has given both Hunter’s stars plenty of work. Bonneville, too, has appeared in his fair share of Austen-inspired dramas (Lost in Austen, Miss Austen Regrets, Mansfield Park). The trend hasn’t been intentional, he says, but he thinks you can overdose on a certain type of role. ‘I did actually wear the same pair of trousers in Lost in Austen and Miss Austen Regrets so that was perhaps a bit of overkill,’ he says. ‘Maybe it’s time to hang up the black breeches.’

Bonneville’s major TV role last year was in BBC1′s Bonekickers, a drama about archaeologists solving historical mysteries. It was panned by the critics and lost 37 per cent of its viewers between the first and sixth episodes. Bonneville admits he was surprised by its hostile reception. But, he says, ‘It wasn’t meant to be a serious archaeological investigation. It was an adventure show and people didn’t get that. But if we didn’t hit the right tone for everyone, then mea culpa.’

Thankfully Hunter, with its clever, compelling script and the return of Bonneville and McTeer’s detecting duo, looks likely to win better reviews. Not least from the millions of viewers who were captivated by their superior brand of sleuthing in Five Days.

- Hunter is on Sunday and Monday on BBC1 at 9.00pm

Original article