Benjamin Sniddlegrass and the Cauldron of Penguins.

 With the rest of the family away at the moment, and being on leave myself this week,  I am using the time to catch up on a few things - and to indulge myself! I have remembered to download my podcasts onto my ipod at last so that i can listen to them in the car. So I have been listening to Francine Stock on Radio 4's Film Programme and also the Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode on their weekly film review.

Francine Stock - apart from a having a voice that's the closest thing to velvety Swiss chocolate - engages a wide range of people from the world of cinema using well researched and penetrating questions to draw them out.

Mayo and Kermode offer an effervescing fountain of commentary, opinion and recommendation that is not only entertaining, but is of such consistency that it allows you to accurately gain a handle on the latest releases and determine what you want to see now and what can wait until DVD. Both worth listening to in my opinion.

Together they balance one another out and provide an encyclopaedic understanding of the world of cinema.

Oh! You might be wondering where the title of this post came from. A couple of weeks ago I was driving through Southampton and I saw a billboard advertisement for a new film. Oh!, I thought, I didn't realise the new Harry Potter film was imminent. When I arrived home I told my daughter - a Potter follower and she said that I had got it wrong. What I saw, turns out to be something so much in the Harry Potter mould that it looks like an off-shoot if not a direct copy. The imagery, the font, the conception are pure Potter. It turns out that the film is Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief  which is directed by Christopher  Columbus - Director of the first two Potter films! In the podcast I listened to yesterday, Mark Kermode was so convinced of the link that he thought it should have a title that developed the Potter theme and used a name that was better than Percy Jackson. So the title 'Benjamin Sniddlegrass and the Cauldron of Penguins' was born and apparently hasn't been registered as a trade mark .... watch this space!