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Chaplin writer to adapt novel for Wild Tales and Mad To Be Normal producers.

Bad Penny Productions has picked up rights to Graham Greene’s last published novel The Captain And The Enemy, which is being adapted for the big screen by screenwriter and novelist William Boyd (Chaplin).

The novel tells the story of a young boy named Victor Baxter taken away from his boarding school by a stranger to live in London. The mysterious stranger is simply known as “the Captain”.

In London Victor companions a sweet but withdrawn woman named Liza, serving as her conduit to the outside world. When Victor reaches manhood, he finally learns the secrets of the Captain.

The thriller includes smuggling, jewel theft and international espionage and culminates in a dramatic showdown in Panama.

In addition to Bad Penny’s Phin Glynn (Mad To Be Normal), other producers are Victor Glynn (That Good Night) and Axel Kuschevatzky (Wild Tales).

The film will...

It’s looking good that the sands in Days of Our Lives‘ iconic hourglass will continue to flow.

NBC is hopeful that it will successfully renew its contract with surviving soap, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last November.

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“We’re happy with where Days was this year,” NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt tells TVLine. “We have a negotiating period that starts in February. Stay tuned.”

Although the show’s current deal doesn’t expire until September, Days famously tapes many months in advance — as such, it will actually fulfill production of episodes under the current deal as early as March.

One of TV’s DC Comics-based series is due to slip in a nod to the venerable Legion of Super-Heroes — but which of them will it be? Supergirl? Legends of Tomorrow? One of the three others?

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Appearing over the weekend at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena, DC Entertainment Cco Geoff Johns shared with reporters after The CW’s Legends panel, “You’ll see a hint of the Legion on one of our shows.”

“Keep watching,” he said, careful not to identify the DC series.

Emmerdale's Eric Pollard has been named as the unhealthiest character in soap.

In 62% of scenes, Eric (Chris Chittell) either has a drink in his hand or he's talking about his next livener. The study was made by Liverpool's John Moores University for the Co-operative store.

Senior British Heart Foundation cardiac nurse Doireann Maddock said: "If Eric wants to reduce his risk of that second heart attack, he needs to spend less time in the Woolpack and more enjoying brisk walks in the Dales – and eating plenty of fruit and veg."

Emmerdale was top of the unhealthy list, while EastEnders came in at second as 87% of the food shown on the programme is deemed bad for the heart.

Arthur 'Fatboy' Chubb (Ricky Norwood) was Walford's worst, with his meals of peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Patrick Trueman (Rudolph Walker) is also deemed unhealthy for adding salt to his soup.

EastEnders...

The full longlist for the Inside Soap Awards 2012 has been announced, with stars from Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks battling it out in a number of categories. Daytime soaps Doctors, Home and Away and Neighbours are also up for gongs, as are dramas Casualty, Holby City and Waterloo Road. Here, Soap Scoop presents the full nominations list: Best Actor

Chris Fountain (Tommy Duckworth, Coronation Street)

Chris Gascoyne (Peter Barlow, Coronation Street)

Alan Halsall (Tyrone Dobbs, Coronation Street)

Steve McFadden (Phil Mitchell, EastEnders)

Shane Richie (Alfie Moon, EastEnders)

Jake Wood (Max Branning, EastEnders)

Steve Halliwell (Zak Dingle, Emmerdale)

John Middleton (Ashley Thomas, Emmerdale)

Dominic Power (more)...

The winners of the 2012 All About Soap Awards have been announced today - with EastEnders and Hollyoaks picking up the most prizes. For our main article about the results - with pictures and quotes from the major winners - head over to the main news section. Here, though, Soap Scoop presents the full winners' list. Best Actress

Coronation Street: Alison King

EastEnders: Jo Joyner - Winner!

Emmerdale: Chelsea Halfpenny

Hollyoaks: Claire Cooper Best Actor

Coronation Street: Chris Gascoyne

EastEnders: Jake Wood

Emmerdale: Danny Miller

Hollyoaks: Emmett Scanlan - Winner! Best Episode

Coronation Street: Steve and Tracy's wedding

EastEnders: Pat's funeral

Emmerdale: Cain's attack

Hollyoaks: Halloween murder - Winner! Best Villain (more)...

Journalists have been glamorous social climbers and bumbling fools in fiction – sometimes they've even been feminists and righters of wrongs

Journalism is a glamorous trade in Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami, as Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod's film adaptation (released in the Us next week and in the UK a week later) underlines by casting Robert Pattinson as Georges Duroy and Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christina Ricci and Holly Grainger as women drawn to the rising Parisian reporter. As well as introducing him to them and assisting his progress as a social climber, working for La Vie Française gives him the power to manipulate or bring down ministers.

What he epitomises too, though, is a press that's sordid and shallow, advancing the personal ends of journalists and owners with no underlying ethical code. Writing talent and a lengthy building up of specialist knowledge aren't essential: Duroy owes...

Steven Spielberg's Tintin provides a welcome view of journalism as an inspiring, heroic trade – the one I fell in love with

One of the best things about the film Tintin is the return of the intrepid reporter. When Hergé's famous comic-book hero first appeared he was a daring reporter, investigating the Land of the Soviets. Tintin's day job as a journalist gradually became less important – in the later books we even encounter negatively the dreaded paparazzi of postwar Europe as baddies or at least irritants – but Steven Spielberg's film stresses that Tintin is a famous journalist.

Quite right too. It's time to bring back positive images of the press.

I know, I know. The real-life antics exposed in the hacking scandal have put paid to romantic images of reporters. But some of us fell in love with the idea of journalism through glamorous cultural portrayals.

Elizabeth Sladen, who died this year,...

Leveson inquiry will feature an all-star cast of celebrities taking the stand to do a reverse kiss-and-tell on the media

When the inevitable Hollywood blockbuster is made of the phone-hacking scandal, directors risk bankrupting their studio when casting this, the most glittering public inquiry in history.

On Tuesday, we heard that over the next two weeks, Hugh Grant, Sienna Millar, Jk Rowling, Steve Coogan and 17 other high-profile core participants will take the stand to do a reverse kiss-and-tell on the media.

Some of the celebrities are more verbose than others, it emerges: Max Mosley, apparently, has submitted 450 pages of evidence – others, just a few paragraphs. It's bound to liven things up in an inquiry already losing momentum: despite having been long-awaited, just two days in, the press gallery of the courtroom was half-empty yesterday.

The annex, a massive tent erected in the courtyard of the Royal Courts of Justice with...

This week's news in the arts

What led William Boot, the bumbling hero of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, to try his luck in print journalism? Was it idealism, the joy of writing – or a fateful trip to an American movie? "He had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York," writes Waugh. "Neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape-machines, insulting and betraying one another in circumstances of unredeemed squalor."

I'm betting the film was The Front Page, the evergreen ur-text for all fictional stabs at the fourth estate. Adapted in 1931 from a Broadway farce by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, this rat-a-tat yarn established the newspaper reporter as a rough-and-ready huckster, cousin to the Chicago bootlegger, always happy to break the rules to get the scoop. And sometimes, inevitably, they go too far. Pete Dexter's Florida-set crime novel...

This ebullient Bollywood comedy may offend some, but for the American government it should be required viewing

"Somebody in this Pakistani government does know where Osama bin Laden is hiding," Hillary Clinton, the Us secretary of state, told reporters in Kabul this week. The accusation was an unusual thing for the representative of one government to say about another that is supposed to be its ally, but the relationship between Pakistan and the Us is not exactly a model of conventional diplomacy. What an opportune moment, then, for the release of the ebullient, controversial Bollywood comedy Tere Bin Laden. "Too soon?" asked Entertainment Weekly (it concluded the answer was no). The film was immediately banned in Pakistan, with censors claiming that it could "trigger violence".

Censors aside, much of the outrage about Tere Bin Laden seems to be emanating from people who have not seen it. It is not, as many assume,...

Clearly, as everyone at Empire Towers demonstrates, journalists are the coolest people on the planet. That must explain why Brad Pitt has acquired the rights to The Imperfectionists via his Plan B production company. Tom Rachman's novel, based on his own experiences as a wire-service reporter in Italy, deals with the trials and tribulations of the staff of an English-language newspaper in Rome. Hacking out editions of an eccentric fifty-year-old enterprise with declining readership and no newfangled concessions to the modern word, like a website, the disparate journos (work-dodger, mid-life crisis, Ocd, Basset hound enthusiast etc.) come together in adversity. It was published earlier this year to a generally enthusiastic response: The New York Times called it a cross between Evelyn Waugh's Scoop and Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.There's no suggestion in Deadline's story that Pitt has his eye on any role but producer...

Russell Smith of the Globe on why we should lament the decline of the book: "[W]e lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves."

Also: some recommendations for books to read: De Niro's Game, by Rawi Hage; Evelyn Waugh's satire of Fleet Street journalism, Scoop (featuring the nature columnist William Boot's immortal line, "Feather-footed through the plashy fen paRead More...

DVD Playhouse—January 2010

By

Allen Gardner

The Hurt Locker (Summit Entertainment) Absorbing character study follows the leader (Jeremy Renner) of a bomb squad unit in Iraq and his growing addiction to the adrenaline-fueled life and death edge that he and his men must walk on a daily basis. Director Kathryn Bigelow, an unheralded great filmmaker for nearly two decades, has finally hit paydirt with this gut-wrenching examination of war as drug, as opposed to hell. That said, The Hurt Locker is 2/3 of a great movie that takes a wild left turn in a subplot involving Renner’s character and that of a local boy to whom he takes a shine, and never quite recovers its momentum. In spite of that hiccup, it remains one of the best films of 2009 and, thus far, the finest cinematic exploration of America’s war in the Middle East. Also available on Blu-ray disc, in...