Huw Saunders

Comedy, and animated comedy in particular, is no stranger to working with unsympathetic protagonists – but whereas the likes of Basil Fawlty and Rick Sanchez let their awful personalities out to play in the form of grandiose antics,…

While it hasn't reached the very-nice heights of the Summer of Borat, Who Is America? proved, if nothing else, there's still a huge appetite for Sacha Baron Cohen wandering around America doing a silly voice and making an ass out of himself…

While it's said that April is the cruellest month, this September's crop of television shows isn't without its meaner side. With at least two tragicomedies, depending on how you're counting, and one outright tragedy, you can really tell the…

After receiving an Emmy nomination for his work as a Vice-Presidential dark horse in Armando Iannucci's political satire Veep, Hugh Laurie is returning to HBO - in the lead role of Iannucci's new project, Avenue 5. Described as a 'space…

“Very few cartoons are broadcast live. It’s a terrible strain on the animators’ wrists.” - The Simpsons, ‘The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show’ There are, of course, other reasons to be wary of live broadcasts – it puts you at the…

Netflix, reigning king of the subscription streaming services, has announced that it will  be experimenting with incorporating adverts – or, as it insists on calling them, ‘trailers’ - for its other shows. Specifically, it will be breaking…

This week, media behemoth Disney responded to a lawsuit from the Michael Jackson Estate over their subsidiary ABC's use of audio and video from the late singer's works in their documentary The Last Days Of Michael Jackson. Their response…

When an email landed in my inbox about an independent comic about people being brought back from the dead with nanobots, I crossed my fingers hoping that this wasn’t taking yet another bite at the depleted, rotting core of the zombie genre.…

After two years of pre-production, it was confirmed on July 27th that filming has begun on the BBC's adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. This is far from the first adaption of Pullman's beloved fantasy series - not…

It’s a little strange just how intuitive we find the idea of each decade having its own distinct culture. As a great philosopher once told us, time keeps on slipping into the future – by which I mean, when the year 2019 rolls around in a…

In a surprise appearance at the Las Vegas Star Trek convention this weekend, Sir Patrick Stewart - despite a healthy run with the Royal Shakespeare Company, best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation - announced…

Any current animated show with a sci-fi theme – hell, quite possibly any animated show period – must live and die in the shadow of the mighty Rick and Morty. Yes, we’ve heard the memes about how you have to have a high IQ to enjoy it, but…

It’s always hard to write about memes in any sort of journalistic context – not least because the field of hard news mentioning any given meme is typically a kiss of death, a vast red klaxon warning us all that the meme has officially been…

When HBO's Deadwood was cancelled after its third season in 2006, there was plenty of mourning. The frontier drama had garnered a reputation as one of the best shows, period, scooping up eight Emmy awards over its comparatively brief run -…

Even as the summer heat finally starts to break, and the humidity returns to a level that doesn’t render people supine on the couch, the haunted fishtank burns as brightly as ever. Or – and more often every day – not the television itself,…

There's a Kurt Vonnegut quote that came into vogue around the time Donald Trump was elected President: “During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in…

This title is, perhaps, misleading. Depending on your precise tastes – and, if it comes to it, the strength of your stomach – the following comedy moments may kill the joke stone dead, or alternatively have you roaring with guilty laughter…

Much like President Trump, who features so prominently in the title sequence, Sacha Baron Cohen’s new project Who Is America? whipped up a good deal of its own publicity through sheer outrage. One-time Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah…

You’ll want to strap yourself in for this – these three really aren’t for the fainthearted. Bluntly, they are not what we would consider normal novels - and if you’ve ever heard the name ‘House of Leaves’, you probably already knew that.…

Mere days after it was announced that HBO's incredibly popular smutty fantasy series Game of Thrones had finally wrapped up filming, the network has now announced that the filming of a prequel series will begin in October, in Belfast's…