beeblePumpkin 🎃

The greatest thing I own or will ever own is this old retail standee where Dracula casually reveals a coffin full of Doritos and Pepsi.

💳

aye – also, 'Sara Lee' is basically American for 'Mr Kipling.' "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee!"

Sara Lee

Here's something to inspire: when AIDS took Cindy Wilson's brother, the B-52's got in Sara Lee from the West Midlands to play bass. Result: huge album, the one with 'Love Shack.' righteousbabe.com/pages/sara-lee

Just for fun, here's a picture of the actors Filmation used to get the movements and basic character model outlines for He-Man, Teela and Skeletor. Some makeup accentuates muscle features and they have lines on their faces to aid in animating them at various angles.

Part of Russell T Davies' speech on being awarded Outstanding Contribution to Television at the Bafta Cymru awards. (via www.instagram.com/baftacymru)

Not seen that.

The Cleopatras

There's a single, bare female breast in the left margin of one of my #CleoWatch images. It's not even visible if you don't zoom into the lightbox and I almost missed it myself during composition, as I grabbed the frame long ago. Still, the algorthm slapped an adult content warning on that post!

All that 'strictly love for Madame Lamia reminded me of a second Lois Baxter treat...

Star-crossed lovers: Cleopatra VII (Michelle Newell) and Mark Antony (Christopher Neame).

Michelle Newell plays the first and final Cleopatra of 'The Cleopatras.'

"You're Roman – you don't have kings and queens," says Cleopatra VII to Julius Caesar. And so she, Mark Antony and monarchical Egypt fall before Rome. But writer Philip Mackie shows us this period wasn't shaped by Egypt's kings: it was the story of 'The Cleopatras.' #CleoWatch

Christopher Neame as Mark Antony. He once had a role in a famous Doctor Who serial called 'Shada' but he can't have known how similar his performance was to someone in another Who story made that same year. So it was lovely to finally see him in something where he really stands out.

The actors are riveting and the dancers are captivating. Good thing too, because although the Royal Barge is pretty, the BBC was never going to make cinema history with it on licence fee money, and this late in the budget outlay.

As Mark Antony, Christopher Neame makes his entrance in the penultimate episode – upon Cleopatra's luxurious royal barge, "the most beautiful ever seen." Cleopatra VII has bided her time and now urges the younger man to challenge Julius Caesar, as bare and beautiful dancers enmesh. #CleoWatch

Cleopatra the young girl is tutored by Theodotus ( Graham Crowden).

Robert Hardy as Julius Caesar and Michelle Newell as Cleopatra the Seventh.

Michelle Newell – as Cleopatra the young girl – learned well this series' stories of dynasty. As Cleopatra the daughter (a second role) she ruled beside old 'pot belly.' Now the girl is herself queen: in Cleopatra the Seventh, Egypt has the perfect match for Robert Hardy's Julius Caesar. #CleoWatch

Adam Bareham as Fluter

Fluter en femme

Dionysian crossdressing party time: episode five centres on another great turn from someone I'd not heard of, Adam Bareham here as Fluter (Ptolemy XII Auletes). He's a good lad really, despite the royal in¢€st but look out mate: Rome is reaching out for Egypt... #CleoWatch

Pauline Moran as Cleopatra Berenike

Lois Baxter in The Cleopatras. In Doctor Who, she played Count Grendel's woman, Madame Lamia in the fourth Key to Time serial, The Androids of Tara.

1983 and it's a very Siouxsie world: Pauline Moran as Cleopatra Berenike. There's a cracking scene in episode four where she meets the king's mistress played by our #DoctorWho fave Lois Baxter. You could cut the Power Negotiation Subtext with a knife. #CleoWatch

Caroline Mortimer

Graham Crowden

Caroline Mortimer is in almost nothing I've seen before but she's done loads and it feels like I've seen her in everything. Her Cleopatra Thea owns episode two and it's a treat. Also, we get a second of our regular doses of lovely, goofy Graham Crowden as the teacher Theodotus. #CleoWatch

Richard Griffiths as 'pot belly' Ptolemy. It was a good conceit of writer Philip Mackie to give the alphabet soup of historical big names memorable nicknames.

'Pot belly' Ptolemy muses.

Ancient Egypt was just madly decadent and violent in its way, and then they drop Richard Griffiths into it? Surprise: 'pot belly' Ptolemy is quite a shrewd customer – super fun to watch. #CleoWatch

Elizabeth Shepherd in red leather, on a location shoot for a black and white episode of The Avengers, The Town of No Return. She was omitted from the finished episode but you can see her fingers running over a book in close-up.

Elizabeth Shepherd as Cleopatra the Mother

For starters, it was great to See Elizabeth Shepherd central to (and wonderful in) something; for me she'd long been mere off-camera trivia as the first choice to play Emma Peel in The Avengers. #CleoWatch

A perfectly-aligned rank of many Egyptian crowns, symbolising the many Cleopatras of history, in the title sequence of The Cleopatras.

An Egyptian royal court

The much-missed Egyptologist @johnjjohnston.bsky.social introduced me to #TheCleopatras, a prestige BBC miniseries from 1983. It was sexy and machiavellian, very elegant, sometimes repulsive and often nude. A fascinating period with loads of eye makeup for all. Here are my 2020 #CleoWatch tweets.

timeline biscuit

Someone on the Fanderson Facebook page has Photoshopped your image and wallpaper looks a bit sharper now

The state goons are powerless before the awesome might of someone in an inflatable frog costume, and you seriously expect me to believe the situation is hopeless?

Heb Alpert - Rise

the intro of 'Rise' feels weird without a deejay talking over it

The BD has a bit more at the sides but I see loads at the top and bottom is gone

Michael Palin, dressed in ragged clothes / hair / beard, drags himself up the shore, the sea not far behind him. And... if you've no idea what I'm going on about - the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus began today 56 years ago on BBC1. The show began with Michael Palin quite far out to sea, making his way to the shore, crawling towards the camera, and just managing to utter the word "it's..." before he's interrupted by the opening titles and a voiceover telling us the name of the show. Every episode of the first series began with a variation on this, the raggedy character never quite getting to make the full announcement

Fifty six years ago today, around eleven-o'clock-at-night-ish, Michael Palin crawled out of the sea.

I did. It was a timeline cleanse 🙂

New Who series 2 Doscars was great – that photo backdrop in #Derby wasn't. We went a month before u

I'm on a quest to finish household paperwork and you've located the key in advance – here goes!

I thought the second one was going to be a bit heavy on exposition, but it rallied 🔎

On Friday 3 October 2025 at 11:35am, the Film is Fabulous! fb page replied to top fan Justyn Adderley as follows: As mentioned by Sue Malden at our RECOVERED event in May, we are aware of several missing episodes of Doctor Who (Sue stated one or two, but there are more than this) in private film collections in the U.K. We are liaising with the individuals about cataloguing and preserving their entire collection, including the missing Doctor Who episodes, and ensuring that copies are returned to the BBC. We expect to make a detailed announcement shortly.

Now it's been appointed as a charity, @filmisfabulous.bsky.social can powerfully assist sceptical or simply overwhelmed film collectors to make the most of their at-risk celluloid. Already we've heard that we might get some long-lost #DoctorWho episodes back. Donate! facebook.com/permalink.ph...

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.