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| ITV1 The Chase hosted by Bradley Walsh |
| Bradley Walsh hosts a brand new quiz show where each day four contestants pit their wits against The Chaser, a ruthless quiz genius determined to stop them winning at all costs. The four strangers must work as a team, answering general knowledge questions and playing a strategic game in order to win themselves a potential prize pot worth thousands of pounds. The contestants take it in turns to build a cash sum by answering quick fire questions against the clock. Each must then go head-to-head with The Chaser in a race to get their money into the team prize pot without being caught. In the chase down the game board, every right answer moves the contestant a step closer to the exit, and every wrong answer gives The Chaser the chance to close the gap. If the contestant gets out without being caught, their money is added to the team prize pot. However, if The Chaser catches them first, the money is lost for the team and the contestant is out of the game. The game concludes with the remaining contestants entering a two minute quick fire round where each correct answer pushes them along the exit route. They must then watch as The Chaser is given two minutes to catch up - if he doesn’t reach them in time, the team prize money is split equally between the contestants. But if he succeeds in catching them, the team goes home with nothing... Weekdays at 5pm, ITV1 |
| Bradley Walsh joins Make-A-Wish |
| Make-A-Wish is delighted to announce that actor and presenter Bradley Walsh has agreed to become our newest Patron. Bradley has been helping Make-A-Wish for several years, for instance regularly acting as a compére at our annual Winter Ball at The Dorchester in London. Famous for his role as DS Brooks in the recently-aired popular ITV drama ‘Law & Order’, as well as for previous roles in ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ and ‘Torn’ (also for ITV), he joins fellow celebrities Ben Barnes, Jenson Button, Keith Chegwin, Jude Law and Alec Stewart in becoming a Make-A-Wish Patron. He is also well-known for his previous role as Danny Baldwin in ‘Coronation Street’, plus a variety of other programmes including The National Lottery, and will continue helping to raise awareness of Make-A-Wish through public appearances and meeting some of our wish children. Bradley said: “Having worked on and off with Make-A-Wish over the last few years, seeing the fantastic work and fundraising they and their supporters have done to make the children’s wishes come true has been truly awe-inspiring. I feel very honoured to be asked to be a Make-A-Wish Patron.” Make-A-Wish Chief Executive Neil Jones said: “Make-A-Wish is extremely proud to welcome Bradley Walsh as a Patron. His dedication and commitment will be a huge asset to the charity, and we are very honoured to welcome such a hugely popular entertainer and actor to our team.” |
| Pre Order Law & Order: UK - Series 1 DVD | |||
Law & Order: UK - Series 1 DVD due to be released January 11, 2010. Pre order now to get it as soon as possible and also at a special price!
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| Ricky Tomlinson Celebrity Golf Day |
| Television star Ricky Tomlinson is hosting a charity day bringing golfers the opportunity of playing 18-holes with top celebrities while supporting his latest effort in a long list of funding-raising events. Ricky, who appeared in Brookside,The Royle Family and appeared with Bradley Walsh in the comedy Mike Bassett: England Manager has raised thousands for charities, including £19,000 for the Cardiac Centre at Broadgreen with an evening at the Empire last year. Now he is planning the first Ricky Tomlinson Celebrity Golf Day, on Tuesday, June 9 2009 at Frodsham Golf Club, Cheshire. The event in aid of the Autism Initiatives is planned as a four ball including a celebrity and those invited include Stan Boardman, Tim Healy, Roy Walker, Norman Collier, Eric Bristow, John Lowe, Howard Kendall, Craig Phillips, Coronation Street celebs, Bradley Walsh and Ralph Little. The cost of the day which includes, dinner, top cabaret, prizes and sporting memorabilia auction is £400 for the team of three which will be joined by one of the celebrities. For more details call Les on 0151 427 1910. |
| Law and Order heads to Britain |
| Law & Order is one of the biggest TV franchises in the world. The US series, which follows the criminal justice process from crime scene to courtroom, is the longest-running prime-time drama currently airing in America, where it has just begun its 20th season. It has already spawned four spin-offs, and tonight ITV1’s new Law & Order: UK marks the first British version of the show. Dick Wolf, the series’s creator, says that viewers of the British version will recognise the familiar Law & Order style, combined with a distinctly British tone. For a start, the show’s London locations are key. “Law & Order has always been shot in a specific way,” he says. “So just as we previously have with New York, we’re using the landscape of London as an integral part of the stories.” Those stories, however, are lifted from early series of Law & Order, and so they’ve required updating to make the transfer to 21st-century Britain. Aside from overcoming the tricky issue of the two countries’ very different legal systems, the production team have had to alter the scripts to take into account, for instance, the fact that the police no longer sit around “waiting for the call”; now they all have mobile phones. The series’s new stars are all British, too. The former Coronation Street actor Bradley Walsh plays down-to-earth, ex-alcoholic DS Ronnie Brooks. Harriet Walter plays his boss, DI Natalie Chandler. And among the prosecuting legal team is Freema Agyeman, one of Doctor Who’s former assistants. However the formula that has made Law & Order such a success in the US has not been tampered with. The show combines a police procedural with the more complex dilemmas of mounting a successful prosecution. Audiences are drawn in by a relatively straightforward attempt to catch criminals. But it’s the subsequent legal complexities that allow Law & Order to tackle broader themes. Wolf maintains that because of this complexity “now more than ever, Law & Order is the smartest drama left on television. The first half of this show is a murder mystery and the second half is a moral mystery.” Bradley Walsh, however, made a conscious decision not to watch the US version before he began filming for ITV. “I didn’t want to be influenced by any other characters,” he says. “DS Brooks is a very gentle soul, and he can really empathise with everyone he meets. Unusually for a copper on TV, he doesn’t have any angst and he very rarely raises his voice.” Walsh says that his character was probably a very gung-ho cop in the Seventies – “like The Sweeney” – but that he’s become a man who realises that bureaucracy has a necessary part to play in modern law enforcement. “None the less, he does want to nick people, he wants to see justice done,” says Walsh. Indeed one of the more unusual aspects of Law & Order: UK is the faith it has in the British legal system, if not always in the lawyers themselves. As assistant prosecutor Alesha Phillips, Freema Agyeman plays a driven, successful young barrister. Agyeman says her character is fundamentally “an opinionated, strong-willed young thing who believes in the system. She feels like the Crown Prosecution Service works and that she too can help bring about justice.” That, adds Agyeman, “makes her rather more contemplative than Martha Jones”, the all-action Doctor Who character that made her name. Agyeman is herself a Londoner, and Wolf and his team were keen to keep up a Law & Order tradition by making the show’s setting feel like one of the cast. “Initially there was a lot of back and forth between me in America and the team in London about the technical details,” he says. “We’re paying for the city, so we try to use it in every shot.” However, one thing that Wolf wishes he could have transferred wholesale from the US is the number of episodes in a series. In America, a typical TV drama will run for more than 20 episodes. Law & Order: UK, ITV’s flagship drama for 2009, is 13 episodes, although that is still relatively long by British standards. But, as you might expect from the man at the helm of one of the world’s biggest TV franchise, Wolf is bullish. “My goal is to get ITV up to 18 or 20 – if this one works,” he says. And it will be quite a coup if the UK version wins enough viewers to meet Wolf’s bold ambitions. |
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