"Actor: Sam Ellis"

• Billboard Dad | DVD | (19/07/2004) from £13.71   |  Saving you £0.28 (2.04%)   |  RRP £13.99

  One's a surfer. The other's a high diver. When these two sisters team up to find a new love for their newly single Dad it's a fun-loving eye-catching California adventure gone wild. Mary-Kate and Ashley star in this fabulously funny love-struck comedy filled with crazy schemes and cool surprises. Determined to find their Dad Max a new love the girls paint a personals ad on a giant billboard in the heart of Hollywood. After a few disastrous dates Max finally meets Brooke and it's love at first sight. There's just one hitch her unruly skateboarding son is the girls' arch rival. Now with the girls plotting every action-packed step of the way they've got to find out if love really does conquer all. Full of outrageous events mixed-up matches and lots of laughs Billboard Dad tops the charts as Mary-Kate and Ashley's coolest mischieve-making adventure ever.

• Simon Schama - A History of Britain : The Complete Series | DVD | (18/11/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £59.99

  Stretching from the Stone Age to the year 2000, Simon Schama's Complete History of Britain does not pretend to be a definitive chronicle of the turbulent events which buffeted and shaped the British Isles. What Schama does do, however, is tell the story in vivid and gripping narrative terms, free of the fustiness of traditional academe, personalising key historical events by examining the major characters at the centre of them. Not all historians would approve of the history depicted here as shaped principally by the actions of great men and women rather than by more abstract developments, but Schama's way of telling it is a good deal more enthralling as a result. Schama successfully gives lie to the idea that the history of Britain has been moderate and temperate, passing down the generations as stately as a galleon, taking on board sensible ideas but steering clear of sillier, revolutionary ones. Nonsense. Schama retells British history the way it was--as bloody, convulsive, precarious, hot-blooded and several times within an inch of haring off onto an entirely different course. Schama seems almost to delight in the goriness of history. Themes returned to repeatedly include the wars between the Scots and the Irish and the Catholic/Protestant conflicts--only the Irish question remains unresolved by the new millennium. As Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy, Schama talks less of Kings and Queens but of poets and idea-makers like Orwell. Still, with his pungent, direct manner and against an evocative visual and aural backdrop, Schama makes history seem as though it happened yesterday, the bloodstains not yet dry. On the DVD: The Complete History of Britain extras are generously packaged on a separate disc and include the original score and a Simon Schama biography. There's an interesting "promotional message" to camera in which Schama explains the role of a cab driver, Wally, in inspiring the series, along with an interview with Mark Lawson in which Schama stresses the deliberate subjectivity of these programmes and an inaugural BBC History lecture in which he defends TV's ability to transpose history to camera. --David Stubbs

• Complicity | DVD | (10/07/2000) from £17.29   |  Saving you £2.70 (15.62%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Based on the Iain Banks novel this gripping thriller is set in Scotland with a strong cast including the brilliant Johnny Lee Miller. Cameron Colley is a journalist who writes articles that takes the underdog's viewpoint. His motives are shared by a serial killer who commits murder on behalf of the underdog. The two stories then begin to fuse together...

• Trigger Happy TV - Best Of Series 1 | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £5.99   |  Saving you £4.00 (66.78%)   |  RRP £9.99

  First shown by Channel 4 at the beginning of 2000, Trigger Happy TV is one of those hidden-camera shows that plays pranks on the unsuspecting public. The brainchild of writer-performer Dom Jolly and his co-director Sam Cadman, it's a beguiling selection of endearingly daft scenes triggered by the admirably straight-faced Jolly (an inappropriate name if ever there was one). His characters include, among many others, a traffic warden who ticks off street cleaners for parking their carts on double-yellow lines; a business man who produces a three-foot-long mobile phone and bellows loudly into the handset; and an incompetent secret-service agent who sidles up to people on park benches, slipping them cryptic messages. Unlike the elaborate ruses of other hidden-camera shows, the best gags here are decidedly low-tech and simple: Jolly's attempt to interact with a stuffed dog he's taken for a "walk" in the park, much to bemusement of passing joggers, is fairly typical of the programme's mix of deadpan humour and surreal visuals--less Beadle's About, more absurdist street theatre. And instead of relying on a laugh track to set the mood, the show has a surprisingly eclectic, even at times strangely mellow and introspective, soundtrack from such acts as The Happy Mondays, Elastica and the Stereophonics. While some of the recurring gags were beginning to flag by the end of the series, the beauty of this compilation is that it features only the strongest material. However, we won't get a chance to see the prank Jolly played on Bill Wyman, who objected when it was first screened on television. Wyman might not get Jolly's impish brand of humour. But this fresh and entertaining compilation gives the rest of us a chance to sample it for ourselves. --Edward Lawrenson

• Trigger Happy TV - Series 2 | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Prankster Dom Joly adds a marvellously surreal edge to the hidden camera show in this, his second collection of highlights from Trigger Happy TV, all of which are once again set to a great soundtrack of downbeat anthems. Joly not only waylays unsuspecting members of the public and minor celebrities, he subjects them to any number of odd or downright bizarre scenarios. Among many other gems here we have the millionth customer at the sex shop, the MI6 recruiting officer whose potential recruitee is frighteningly willing to become an assassin, the infuriating traffic warden ("You can't park here"), the workmen who eat and sleep in the middle of the street, the cultured punk, the obvious burglar, the park warden who eats all the birds, and the ice cream man who is incapable of serving anything. Best of all, perhaps, are the creature features: the snail literally crawling across the zebra crossing, the vain gorilla-gram, not to mention sundry sadistic squirrels, dangerous dogs and randy rabbits. Oh yes, and there's still that guy with the huge mobile phone, though it must be increasingly hard for Joly to find anyone who doesn't know this character by now. Trigger Happy TV gamely exploits the British public's unwillingness to confront strangers, but it also hearteningly demonstrates their innate politeness when placed in awkward situations. In how many other countries could he approach people in the street to insult and bemuse them without running a serious risk of assault? On the DVD: The disc has an excellent, irreverent commentary from Joly and producer Sam Cadman, who talk about the difficulties of filming, chat to people on their mobile phones and munch snacks from the Abbey Road studio canteen. There's also the excruciating stand-up routine Joly did pseudonymously at The Comedy Store, which if nothing else proves he's got no shame at all. --Mark Walker

• Trigger Happy TV - Series 3 | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £4.60   |  Saving you £5.39 (117.17%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Trigger Happy TV 3 is another compilation from the cult late night Channel 4 comedy that turbo-charged the old Candid Camera format with a cool rock soundtrack for the MTV generation. While the show itself could become repetitive, the 42 minutes of highlights distilled into the main feature here are frequently hilarious. See public prankster Dom Joly wrestle a giant badger in the woods, enjoy the office populated entirely by people dressed as bears and collapse with laugher at the most surreal estate agent scenario in the world. From a terribly insecure policeman to the street guide who doesn't know the location of anything, Joly's nerve at pulling off some of these gags is breathtaking. The supporting feature is a half-hour spoof biography of Joly made to introduce Trigger Happy TV to American audiences. Deadpan in the extreme, it sends up the fly-on-the-wall genre and celebrity interview with uncomfortably accurate wit. That's not the end, because the presentation makes the line between programme and extras largely irrelevant, so read on to see what else is... On the DVD: Trigger Happy TV 3 can simply be played straight through so that everything on the disc makes a 90-minute pseudo feature, or individual sections can be selected as extras. There are 14 mostly worthwhile unseen clips, three "Bad Rabbit Jokes" (and they are bad), the three "Worst Ideas Ever" (they are), "Brushes with the Law" (which was bound to happen with such stunts as White Van Man's road rage), and four hugely entertaining previously unseen Celebrity Interviews with Hanif Kureishi, Bret Easton Ellis, Uri Geller and Alan Titchmarsh. The commentary track by Joly and Sam Cadman rambles with entertaining irrelevance from a deaf George Martin producing their recording at Studio 2, Abbey Road, to rather more believable recollections of being arrested in Belgium. --Gary S Dalkin

• THIS IS ENGLAND - MOVIE | DVD | (23/10/2008) from £9.75   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Trigger Happy TV The Collection | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Prankster Dom Joly adds a marvellously surreal edge to the hidden camera show in Trigger Happy TV, all of whose episodes are set to a great soundtrack of downbeat anthems. Joly not only waylays unsuspecting members of the public and minor celebrities, he subjects them to any number of odd or downright bizarre scenarios. Among many other gems here we have the millionth customer at the sex shop, the MI6 recruiting officer whose potential recruitee is frighteningly willing to become an assassin, the infuriating traffic warden ("You can't park here"), the workmen who eat and sleep in the middle of the street, the cultured punk, the obvious burglar, the park warden who eats all the birds, and the ice cream man who is incapable of serving anything. Best of all, perhaps, are the creature features: the snail literally crawling across the zebra crossing, the vain gorilla-gram, not to mention sundry sadistic squirrels, dangerous dogs and randy rabbits. Oh yes, and there's still that guy with the huge mobile phone, though it must have been increasingly hard for Joly to find anyone who didn't know that character already. Trigger Happy TV gamely exploits the British public's unwillingness to confront strangers, but it also hearteningly demonstrates their innate politeness when placed in awkward situations. In how many other countries could he approach people in the street to insult and bemuse them without running a serious risk of assault? --Mark Walker

• Chasing Liberty / What A Girl Wants | DVD | (24/04/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Chasing Liberty: Every family has a rebel. Even the First Family! She's the President's daughter. But she just wants to be herself. Multi-talented Mandy Moore makes her romantic comedy debut as Anna who finally gets Dad (Mark Harmon) to reduce the number of agents while she goes to a music club. But when Anna arrives at the club she realizes her father has backed out of the deal she ditches the agents and goes on the run with Ben a handsome photographer she meets. Anna does

• Sign of the Killer | DVD | (19/02/2007) from £4.90   |  Saving you £1.09 (22.24%)   |  RRP £5.99

  In this spine-tingling and visually stunning thriller Samuel L. Jackson is Romulus Ledbetter a misunderstood musician turned recluse hiding from personal demons in a New York City cave. When Romulus finds the frozen body of a young drifter in a tree the authorities - including his police officer daughter (Aunjanne Ellis) - claim the death is accidental. Romulus is convinced the man was murdered by prominent art photographer David Leppenraub (Colm Feore). But how can he prove he's right when everyone thinks he's insane?

• Attraction | DVD | (10/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Matthew is a radio 'agony uncle' unable to heed his own advice after breaking up with girlfriend Liz he won't leave her alone. A terrified Liz turns to Matthew's best friend and a dark tale of obsession and desire is unleashed. A riveting thriller that twists and turns.

• Merchant-Ivory In America | DVD | (25/10/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  The Bostonians The daughter of a faith healer is forced to choose between her mother's religious activities and her desire to use her speaking ability to further the women's suffragette movement. To complicate matters more the man she loves is strongly opposed to the feminist cause. The Europeans In 1850 a few miles outside Boston the household of the dour Mr. Wentworth receives two unannounced visitors from Europe Eugenia and Felix the daughter and son of his half sister. Gertrude one of Wentworth's two daughters is instantly infatuated with her cousins and trouble brews... The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe A tangled triangle. In the rural South of the early 20th century Miss Amelia is the town eccentric... Jane Austen In Manhattan Two teachers vie for the right to stage a play written by Jane Austen when she was twelve years old... Roseland Three interlocking stories set in the legendary New York City dance palace make up this charming film the third to be shot by Merchant Ivory Productions in America. In the first segment 'The Waltz' Teresa Wright is a widow who comes to Roseland in order to sustain the memory of her late husband where she meets Stan (Lou Jacobi) a man who offers her an opportunity for happiness in the present. In 'The Hustle' Christopher Walken stars as a gigolo with three women in his life all of whom depend on him for different degrees of romance and companionship. In the final segment 'The Peabody' an older Vietnamese woman (Lilia Skala) sets out to win a dance competition despite warnings that it could imperil her health. The Proprietor A story of changing times constant relationships and reconciliation with the past.

• Sign Of The Killer | DVD | (29/09/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  In this spine-tingling and visually stunning thriller Samuel L. Jackson is Romulus Ledbetter a misunderstood musician turned recluse hiding from personal demons in a New York City cave. When Romulus finds the frozen body of a young drifter in a tree the authorities - including his police officer daughter (Aunjanne Ellis) - claim the death is accidental. Romulus is convinced the man was murdered by prominent art photographer David Leppenraub (Colm Feore). But how can he prove he's right when everyone thinks he's insane?

• The Chaos Theory | DVD | (31/07/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The Fat Cats bring you the hottest UK boaters going big in 11 countries. The film that will resurrect the UK Kayaking scene.

• Sign Of The Killer | DVD | (12/04/2004) from £66.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £66.99

  Variously described by critics as "Riveting", "Stunning", "Exciting..Stylish and Slick", & "An Ingenious Thriller" this is a little gem of a thriller, directed by actress turned director Kasi Lemmons, & starring the always superb, Samuel L. Jackson (Snakes On A Plane, Pulp Fiction ) as Romulus Ledbetter, a once devoted family man, now living rough on the streets os Manhattan. His home is a cave in the park and when he finds a frozen corpse outside the entrance one day he becomes determined to find out how the man died and prove he was murdered . To do this he has to re-enter the world he is no longer a part of, and most importantly confront his own inner demons. Very overlooked on it's original release it's a clever involving film, with Jackson totally believable as always.

• True Blood: Season 3 | DVD | (11/04/2011) from £21.98   |  Saving you £20.85 (104.30%)   |  RRP £40.84

  Thanks to a Japanese scientist's invention of synthetic blood vampires have progressed from legendary monsters to fellow citizens overnight. And while humans have been safely removed from the menu many remain apprehensive about these creatures coming out of the coffin. Religious leaders and government officials around the world have chosen their sides but in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps the jury is still out. Local waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) however knows how it feels to be an outcast. Cursed with the ability to listen in on people's thoughts she's also open-minded about the integration of vampires - particularly when it comes to Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) a handsome 173-year-old living up the road. But at the service of Bill's less virtuous vampire associates Sookie is drawn into a series of catastrophes that will put their love to the test. The latest hit series from 'Six Feet Under' creator Alan Ball 'True Blood' delves into the meticulously-crafted world of novelist Charlaine Harris. Described by the Emmy winning Ball as popcorn for smart people the first season of 'True Blood' caused an overnight sensation - and the new installments only build on his colorful cast of supernatural misfits.

• True Blood: Season 3 | Blu Ray | (11/04/2011) from £16.19   |  Saving you £34.86 (215.32%)   |  RRP £51.05

  Thanks to a Japanese scientist's invention of synthetic blood vampires have progressed from legendary monsters to fellow citizens overnight. And while humans have been safely removed from the menu many remain apprehensive about these creatures coming out of the coffin. Religious leaders and government officials around the world have chosen their sides but in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps the jury is still out. Local waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) however knows how it feels to be an outcast. Cursed with the ability to listen in on people's thoughts she's also open-minded about the integration of vampires - particularly when it comes to Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) a handsome 173-year-old living up the road. But at the service of Bill's less virtuous vampire associates Sookie is drawn into a series of catastrophes that will put their love to the test. The latest hit series from 'Six Feet Under' creator Alan Ball 'True Blood' delves into the meticulously-crafted world of novelist Charlaine Harris. Described by the Emmy winning Ball as popcorn for smart people the first season of 'True Blood' caused an overnight sensation - and the new installments only build on his colorful cast of supernatural misfits.