Wednesday 10 April 2013

TV

The Great British Sewing Bee
1x02 Episode 2
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Have I Got News For You
45x01 (5/4/2013 edition; extended repeat)
[Watch the extended version (again) on iPlayer.]

Veronica Mars
1x05 You Think You Know Somebody

DVD Extras

Secrets Revealed! Quidditch
Secrets Revealed! Hagrid
The Harry Potters You Never Met

(from the Harry Potter Wizard's Collection Bonus Disc)

A series off 11-minute (ish) featurettes that are exclusively found on the aforementioned bonus disc. The most interesting is the Hagrid one, showing how they went about making the 6-foot Robbie Coltrane appear like a giant across the eight films. To be honest, I thought they'd given up after the first few, but nooo, they really hadn't -- and it's quite remarkable how it was all done.

The third featurette is about the lead cast's stunt doubles, many of whom remained the same throughout the series. An ominous note creeps in early on when they discuss how Daniel Radcliffe became great mates with the guy who doubled for him on "six of the eight films". Why not all? The featurette reveals what can happen when stunts go wrong...

Finally, the Quidditch featurette is also fairly good, skipping the standard "what blue screen is" stuff that we all know now in favour of the particular challenges of making people fly on brooms, and how they evolved and changed that down the films.