Little Dorrit will be released on Region 2 DVD in the UK on January 26, 2009.

Extras are supposed to include behind the scenes material.

Be sure to pre-order your own copy of this excellent series!

This week the final 2 episodes air on Wednesday and Friday on BBC1 at 8.00 pm

And so we say farewell to Claire Foy’s hugely appealing Little Dorrit as Andrew Davies’s masterful adaptation reaches its climax.

There have been some wonderful characterisations throughout, with Tom Courtenay bravely unloveable as the self-indulgent, vain and brutally snobbish Mr Dorrit, Judy Parfitt as the dragon-like Mrs Clennam, the wonderful Eddie Marsan as snorting pit-bull Pancks, and Matthew Macfadyen as Arthur Clennam, the rock around which all previous storms have dashed themselves.

Macfadyen’s role could easily have been a bore but he somehow managed to convey Arthur’s saintly, solid reliability without ever making it tedious.

Beware: Spoilers ahead
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The BBC has received 4,680 complaints from viewers angry that last night’s episode of costume drama Little Dorrit was replaced at the last minute with a Panorama special on the Shannon Matthews trial.

Today the corporation apologised to BBC1 viewers who were annoyed at the late move of the drama, as well as factual series The People’s Hospital, to make way for the hour-long current affairs special.
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Thousands of viewers complained to the BBC after the corporation cancelled an episode of Little Dorrit to screen a documentary about the Shannon Matthews case.

The lavish adaptation of the Charles Dickens tale was replaced with a Panorama programme titled Shannon: The Mother of All Lies on Thursday night.

It followed the conviction of Shannon’s mother Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan for kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice.

The BBC complaints line received calls from 4,680 viewers, some of whom branded the last minute cancellation “inconsiderate” and “outrageous”.
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Nicolas Cage is going medieval.

The National Treasure star is in Austria filming the 14th-century supernatural thriller Season of the Witch. He plays a knight charged with exiling a sorceress. “He has come back from the Crusades and has lost his faith in the church and in God,” says producer Charles Roven (The Dark Knight).

The witch is played by Claire Foy (British TV’s Little Dorrit). Ron Perlman (Hellboy) co-stars.

“Wherever the witch has gone, the plague has followed,” Roven says. “So they need to transport her to the mountains and perform a ritual that will lift whatever enchantment she has on the land.”

source: USA Today, by Anthony Breznican

Quite dramatic changes taking place in the second episode from last week. Enjoy the HQ screencaptures from the eight episode of “Little Dorrit“:

452 Little Dorrit (TV, 2008) > Screencaptures > Part 8

A new miniseries on Channel 4. Lovely screencaptures from the first episode are up on our family site Long Ago Captures.

Synopsis:

The Devil’s Whore tells the story of the seismic events of 17th-century England, when political disobedience turned to revolution and civil war, and English history changed forever. The story is told through the experiences of a spirited aristocratic woman, Angelica Fanshawe (Andrea Riseborough), who comes to know the key figures on both sides of this bitter conflict. It is a story not just of political and historical significance, but of love, loss, murder, courage and betrayal.

Angelica is born in 1623, when England is divided both politically and religiously. When Angelica’s deeply religious mother gives up her daughter and flees to France to the sanctuary of a Catholic convent, the child Angelica curses God. Thereafter, at key moments throughout the rest of her life, she is haunted by images of the Devil, seemingly cursed for her moment of rash blasphemy.
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The English civil war gets an overdue celebration in The Devil’s Whore, a thrilling new TV drama from Peter Flannery

There are moments when The Devil’s Whore, coming soon on Channel 4, seems almost too rich and exotic to be a British drama. Hollywood’s accepted agenda for heroes — whether fighting aliens in Independence Day, Persians in 300, slave-owners in Amistad or the British in pretty much anything starring Mel Gibson — is the struggle for liberty and justice. Our homegrown screen champions, conversely, usually shuffle awkwardly through deeds performed for money, deception, loyalty or petty compromise. So it’s strange to hear epic speeches against tyranny delivered, without irony, by English lips.

“My liberty is his to take — but not to give,” a Leveller cries. “I am freeborn John Lilburne. We will not live like slaves. Nor will we loll in our beds while he bring in an Irish army or a Scotch army to kill us.” Later, Oliver Cromwell pleads for Lilburne in Parliament thus: “Then where is the justice for John Lilburne that rots still in the Fleet by a sentence most illegal, against the liberty of the subject, bloody, wicked, barbarous and tyrannical?”
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Peter Flannery’s new Civil War epic is a sex-fuelled, violent bloodfest that’s more Sergio Leone than Shakespeare, finds Gerard Gilbert

Roundheads and cavaliers… class warfare… regicide… families at one another’s throats… an explosion of radical ideas… You’d think that the English Civil War would be meat and drink to any half-sentient dramatist.

But think again, for while across our screens flounce no end of Henry VIIIs and Elizabeth Is, the revolution that saw a monarch beheaded and long-oppressed subjects daring to dream of equality has largely been ignored.

But that’s all about to change with Peter Flannery’s four-part civil war drama The Devil’s Whore, which stars John Simm, Andrea Riseborough and Michael Fassbender, and begins on Channel 4 next week. This is a full-blooded epic that’s greedy for the history overlooked by so many others.
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Channel 4’s new drama The Devil’s Whore is set during the English Civil War. Its stars and writer tell Serena Davies why the period is so ripe for dramatisation

Channel 4’s new four-part costume drama, The Devil’s Whore, is full of wild storms, furious winds and camera angles so eccentric they make it look like chaos has come to Earth.

The story’s genuinely new: this particular trip back in time isn’t, for once, a literary adaptation. And it’s full of all that crazy weather because its talented director, Marc Munden (The Mark of Cain), is trying to conjure a sense of impending apocalypse.
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