My favourite Rex 'handler' is Richard Moser, beautifully acted by Tobias Moretti although his replacement in the new series, Gedeon Burkhard, also does a very good job. There were two dogs who played the role of Rex, Reginald von Ravenhorst and Rhett Butler and both dogs had equal charm. The two were trained by the distinguished animal trainer, Teresa Ann Miller. Series One to Six are currently available from Australian DVD outlets, complete with English subtitles and spoken in German. I highly recommend this series to anybody, and it is an absolute must if you are an animal lover.

Visit Kommissar Rex at TV Rage for the best English speaking episode guide on the internet:

http://www.tvrage.com/Kommissar_Rex

Anthony Valentine was born on August 17, 1939, at Blackburn in Lancashire, England. His first professional appearance was at the age of ten, in a film entitled 'No Way Back'. At eleven, he was working regularly for BBC Television; one of his earliest roles was that of Harry Wharton in that most famous of children's serials 'Billy Bunter'. The same year he sang at Sadler's Wells in a season of Italian Opera. He has had a successful career to this day.

'Hannay', starring Robert Powell, is now available for preorder on DVD from Amazon UK and will be released on 13th February, 2006.

This is welcome news for the program's many fans. Although it has been some time since 'Hannay' was first made, it has stood the test of time and is still very popular. The television series, which stars Robert Powell, was a follow on from the 1977 movie also starring Robert Powell.

Ripping Yarns

On January 8, 1976 there was but one topic of conversation for schoolboys aged 13 and over. The big question heard in Britain’s playgrounds that morning was ‘Did you see “Tomkinson’s Schooldays” last night?’ To admit that you hadn’t seen the bit where Tomkinson picks up the ball in a rugby game and keeps on running, long past the point where he should have stopped to score a try, with the cries of his classmates and teachers fading into the distance, was as shameful as saying you liked the Bay City Rollers.

The show was the pilot of a series called ‘Ripping Yarns’, set in a bygone era when the British schoolboy was expected to show pluck, even if his elders did celebrate the end of term by nailing him to the school walls. That was the kind of thing that happened in “Tomkinson’s Schooldays”, the ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ spoof written by ex-Pythons Michael Palin (who played the lead) and Terry Jones, who stayed off-screen. School Bully was not an accusation but an official rank and Ian Ogilvy looked far more at ease as a cad that he had as the new Simon Templar.

This being a satire of a certain kind of British adventure yarn, it all worked out well in the end, with Tomkinson rising through the ranks to become school bully. But the misery, the indifference – even the punishment – struck a chord with millions of 1970s schoolboys who had never got closer to a public school than reading the Tom Brown novel.

The best of the other yarns was ‘The Testing Of Eric Orthwaite’ about the most boring man in Yorkshire whose Mum and Dad run away from home because he’s so boring with endless talk about black pudding (“even the white bits were black”), fire shovels and rain gauges (“It were hard to accept I were boring. Especially with my interest in rain fall”), and ‘Golden Gordon’, a tragic tale of the last days of Barnstoneworth United, supported by Gordon Ottershaw (Palin) who comes home each week after their latest thrashing to wreck the living room in disgust. With its tales of forward lines of yore (“the mighty Davit once scored a goal with the back of his head from 28 yards”) this yarn is familiar to anyone who asked their Dad what football was like in their day.

The yarns ended after nine instalments. The policy of shooting on real film (and Palin and Jones’s attention to period detail) meant they were just too expensive. Palin’s likeable (if undemanding) ‘The Missionary’ is a kind of companion piece. The untimely end did, at least, mean that the ripping yarns remained gripping to the last.

Peter Falk will forever be linked with the raincoat-wearing detective who asked suspects about their shoes. But the character was created seven years earlier for a show called ‘The Sunday Mystery Hour’ (in which Columbo was played by Bert Freed), and when the script for the TV movie ‘Prescription: Murder floated around Hollywood in 1968, Falk only got the part because Bing Crosby became unavailable. Falk has since played the shuffling detective in this series more than 70 times (his third movie, ‘Columbo: Murder By the Book’, was directed by a very young Steven Spielberg in 1971). In 1992, Falk was given a fresh raincoat to wear; the original was said to be at the Smithsonian Museum, but Falk insists it is in his wardrobe. If you find Columbo intensely irritating, don’t worry – it is deliberate. He is loosely based on the inspector who brings down Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’.