"Actor: Frankie Wilson"

• Cradle to Grave Series 1 | DVD | (26/10/2015) from £9.55   |  Saving you £10.44 (109.32%)   |  RRP £19.99

  It's 1974 and fifteen-year-old Danny is our guide through the ups and downs of life with the Baker family. Dad Fred, known to all and sundry as ˜Spud', is a proud south London docker with a penchant for rackets, fiddles and schemes, hopefully ˜nice and tasty' ones. Wife Bet loves him deeply but longs for the family to go ˜straight', and do daft things like pay taxes and put money in the electricity meter instead of always trying to scam it. With eldest daughter Sharon's wedding looming, the docks facing closure and a switch to the dreaded ˜containerisation' putting thousands of dockers out of work, times are challenging. So too are Danny's attempts to get closer to the opposite sex. Full of humour, warmth and drama, Cradle To Grave is based on actual events and characters.

• My Dog Skip (2000) | DVD | (04/06/2001) from £5.16   |  Saving you £8.83 (171.12%)   |  RRP £13.99

  My Dog Skip, a nonpareil family film, is, as one of the characters so aptly puts it, "a heartbreak waiting to happen". Frankie Muniz, winning over audiences in the TV series Malcolm in the Middle, has competition in My Dog Skip--Skip himself (adorably played by a total of six Jack Russell terriers). Muniz, an inveterate charmer, stars as Willie Morris (from whose memoir the film is adapted), a gawky, awkward boy growing up during World War II under an overly protective father (Kevin Bacon). When his mom (Diane Lane) gives him Skip on his ninth birthday, his life is changed in every way for the better. Previously disinterested peers become pals, and he experiences puppy love with a girl named Rivers (Caitlin Wachs). There are plenty of high jinks and rah-rah touches of Americana, and the film also attempts to deal with sophisticated emotions--Willie's boyhood hero turns out to be less than heroic--but its devastating emotional core comes, simply and obviously, with Skip's eventual ageing and demise. Dog lovers will be wiped out; those who don't care for canines shouldn't even be bothering to read this review. (Ages 8 and older) --David Kronke, Amazon.com