In 2015, the BBC had delayed the fifth Stargazing Live series until March to coincide with the solar eclipse, but this year they’re back in their January slot and in December Brian Cox and Dara O Briain had already covered the launch and docking of the new ISS crew with British astronaut Tim Peake on board. So this time it will all be about the space station and astronauts and the program’s twitter feed has already been telling all about it – including that there will be an additional broadcast on Friday on the occasion of Tim Peake’s first spacewalk. Unfortunately, there will be only one Back to Earth after-show chat this time for the first program, probably because of all the additional broadcasts, but with four main hour-long entries this is going to be an amazing event nevertheless. The schedule for BBC2 looks like this at the moment:

Tuesday January 12th
• 21:00-22:00 GMT: Episode 1
• 22:00-22:30 GMT: Back to Earth 1

Wednesday January 13th – 21:00-22:00 GMT: Episode 2
Thursday January 14th – 21:00-22:00 GMT: Episode 3
Friday January 15th – 21:00-22:00 GMT: Episode 4

Unfortunately the series has, typically for a BBC live production, never been released on DVD, but all episodes from 2011, 2012 and 2015 are still up on Youtube at these links:

• Stargazing Live 2011 – Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3
• Stargazing Live 2012 – Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3
• Stargazing Live 2015 – Episode 1 & BTE 1 | Episode 2 & BTE 2 | Episode 3 & BTE 3
• Stargazing Live 2015 Special – Blast Off Live  | Brit in Space

For the last post of the year I haven’t been able to finish a review, but here’s a TV recommendation instead: after the huge success of the Shaun the Sheep Movie, Aardman has produced a brand-new half-hour movie called The Farmer’s Llamas for Christmas! The premiere broadcast is on Saturday, December 26 on BBC One at 18:10 with repeats on December 27, 09:05 on CBBC and January 1, 16:05 on BBC One again (all GMT times). It will also be shown on German television on Friday, January 1, 17:05 on the children’s channel KiKa with repeats on Saturday, January 2, 08:45 on WDR and again on KiKa at 13:20 on the same day (all CET times).

There’s a short trailer and a featurette with more footage on the Shaun the Sheep Youtube Channel promising all sorts of shenanigans involving the new farm arrivals and the BBC is also airing a new, hour-long Aardman Documentary on Saturday, December 26 on BBC One at 14:25 GMT following an airing of the classic Wallace & Gromit debut A Grand Day Out.

The Farmer’s Llamas will also be released on DVD in the UK on February 8 and in Germany on March 10 – although the prices are a bit steep for just an half-hour movie. This is one DVD I will not be buying, but instead I will finally get the boxset of Series 3 & 4 soon, which has already been released in October and I only just found out about – I haven’t even seen those episodes yet!

Since this is the last post of the year for DVDLog, I’d like to wish everyone Happy Holidays – I will post some more season’s greetings soon over on my blog. I’m not sure when I’m going to start up DVDLog again, but there will be a Winter pause until early to mid-January, although there could be some occasional posts in the meantime. Stay tuned! :-)

First of all, I won’t be able to see the new Star Wars movie until the home video releases are out sometime next year, simply because going to the cinema to see the only showing of the original English version in our region would be much too expensive – but I’m in no rush and I can wait. Don’t get me wrong – I really hope that the movie turned out well, but I’m still skeptical about the whole hype. Now that the first reviews of The Force Awakens are out, I’m beginning to suspect that the press might be a little bit too enthusiastic and I fear that the same has happened as with the new Star Trek movies – everybody loved them, but I found them absolutely terrible. And both times J.J. Abrams are involved plus the addition of Disney in the mix make me wary, so pardon the pun when I say I have a bad feeling about this…!

The movie is welcome to prove otherwise in a couple of months when it comes out on DVD… until then I’m just not going to say much about it. You don’t need to worry about spoilering the plot to me, though – I actually would read the film script if I could get my hands on it, but sadly the days of screenplays available freely on the web are long over. Meanwhile, what I’m much more looking forward to is the DVD release of The Martian early next year – and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to write a final review of the year for DVDLog, but if it happens it will probably something from the archive, maybe one more round of Futurama. Which I actually prefer a lot over any incarnation of Star Wars!

This Tuesday on 11:03 GMT, three astronauts will be launching to the International Space Station – Timothy Kopra from NASA, Yuri Malenchenko from Roscosmos and Timothy Peake from ESA, the first Briton to go to space under a British flag. For this occasion, the BBC has pulled out all the stops and will cover both the launch and the docking on Tuesday with two special editions of Stargazing Live, hosted by Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain. According to several news reports, they will be joined by Helen Sharman, the first British citizen to go to space and visit Mir in 1991 and  former Canadian Astronaut and ISS commander Chris Hadfield. BBC science presenter Dallas Campbell will also be reporting live from the Baikonur launch site. Here’s the schedule as of Saturday, December 10:

• 10:30 GMT on BBC One: Blast Off Live is going to cover the hopefully not delayed launch scheduled for 11:03 GMT for 45 Minutes.

• 19:00 GMT on BBC Two: Brit in Space will not be able to cover the actual docking procedures, which are scheduled for 17:24 GMT, but will be right on time for the hatch opening and welcoming starting at 19:25 GMT. This program is scheduled for an hour-long time slot.

• Update: I completely missed that there was a Tim Peake Horizon Special on Sunday evening. This is repeated on Monday evening at 23:15 GMT on BBC2 if you want to catch it again.

As usual, NASA TV will also cover the launch, but the BBC coverage will probably be much more interesting with lots of interviews and much more. Stargazing Live will also return for a new regular series starting on January 12.

I’m not really looking at DVD or Blu-Ray release dates nowadays anymore, but here’s one I’ve been really waiting for: Andy Weir’s The Martian. According to a Space.com article from today, 20th Century Fox will first release the movie in the US as a digital streaming release on December 22, while the DVD and Blu-Ray will follow next year on January 12. There does not seem to be a UK release date yet, but according to Amazon.de the German Blu-Ray and DVD releases are on February 18, so a British release might be around the same time. There are absolutely no words on the bonus materials yet, but there will probably not a lot of them. I’ll probably get either the UK or German release, because when I order the US disc, it will probably arrive only after the European ones come out.

Just as a side note, I have actually not yet seen the movie except in trailers and some featurettes, but I’ve read the book and liked it very much for some very simple reasons. First, it is less science fiction than science future and seems almost entirely plausible. Second, no aliens or some etheral forces are mucking about. Third, Mark Watney may have to suffer more than John McClane in all of the Die Hard movies together, but nobody actually dies in the story! There is a bit of emotional baggage in the book that may or may not have made it into the movie and there’s quite a lot hair-raising excitement, but it seems far away from the drama-fests of Gravity and Interstellar. Despite the huge NASA hype around it – which only really started midway through production – I think the movie is what a proper space adventure should be all about.  I’m sure the movie will be fun, but I will do a merciless review when I’ve seen it!

While everybody’s waiting for the home video release, here’s a throwback to the beginning of this year: author Andy Weir was on the Weekly Space Hangout back in January before he got very busy with the promotion of the movie and was totally in his element. It was a great conversation and he even joined in for the rest of the hangout – it’s very much worth watching!

Once again it has taken me ages, but I’m still continuing with my Futurama review series as good as I can. Today it’s Futurama Season Three on the menu, when the series had reached its perfection that would last a long time. The first two seasons were great, this is when Futurama became amazing with only a few episodes showing some weaknesses. It was also the season in which the big mythology of the series slowly started to emerge, making Futurama much more than just a collection of unconnected stories. Even today, those earlier episodes are surprisingly good considering they are now about fifteen years old. The DVDs are a bit limited in terms of image quality due to the production circumstances, but the commentary tracks on every episodes make them an invaluable collection you won’t get on today’s streaming services.

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Two years ago, I put together a review series for the 30th anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, but I never quite finished it. Although I had covered all of the animated series and the television movies, I never got around to write about the Discworld Adventure Games, which are a part of this unique universe too. It was the first game released in 1995 and simply called Discworld that brought me to Pratchett’s books in the first place, so maybe I have a bit of a soft spot for it, but it is still one of the best adventures of its time. While it has its flaws, the hand-drawn graphics and the brilliant voice acting with none other than Eric Idle in the lead role make this practically another Discworld animated movie. Head over to my other blog to read the complete game review – the first one I’ve written for a long time!

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It’s that time of year again… the most amazing British television quiz show QI returns this Friday, October 16 at 22:00 BST / 23:00 CEST on BBC2 with the episodes of series M recorded earlier this summer. As usual, the 45-minute XL versions will air on Saturday around 21:00 BST, which is unfortunately slightly overlapping with the Doctor Who broadcasts on BBC1! There is already a preliminary episode list with all the guests on Wikipedia and it looks like it will be a lot of fun.

There are also some very sad and at the same time very good news: today the BBC revealed that Stephen Fry will step down as the quizmaster of QI after series M with thirteen years and 180 episodes under his belt. The good news is that his old friend and frequent QI guest Sandy Toksvig will take over in his place beginning next year, which – at least in my opinion – could not be a better choice. Stephen Fry will be missed, but QI will go on with a new, but familiar presenter and producer John Lloyd plus the QI Elves in the background. Meanwhile, there are still sixteen unaired episodes with Stephen Fry to watch this fall and winter!

I’m almost a year too late with this review, but I’ve had such a lot of fun with this movie that I decided to write a review anyway. It’s absolutely classic Dreamworks Animation material – The Penguins of Madagascar may not be the pinnacle of moviemaking, but it’s simply great and clever entertainment with the special twist the studio has become famous for. It also marks the end of an era as the last production of the original PDI studio, where it all began in the mid-1990s. With a fast and quirky script, a bunch of fantastic characters with a wonderful voice cast all brought to life by the brilliant animators, this movie hits all the right notes and while it was not enough to save the venerable PDI part of Dreamworks, it still remains one of their best movies. The DVD is, unfortunately, slightly disappointing with the now common lack of extras, but the technical quality is absolutely impeccable. This article is, like most of my recent ones, more focused on the fim than on the disc itself, so it’s more of a movie review.

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I had mentioned this a long time ago, but the planned release of My Fair Lady in its newly restored version had been delayed for unknown reasons. More than a year later, a new release date has been announced – now it’s finally coming out on October 27, although in the US only for now. Everything has been sort of hush-hush and not even Robert A. Harris, who has been working on both the 1994 and 2015 restorations, was able to comment much about the work on the movie – until now. A couple of days ago, the Home Theater Forum had scored an amazing interview with him, which has a lot of details about the earlier and current restorations of the movie and the huge differences between them. While digtal restoration technology was still in its infancy twenty years ago, this time it was possible to scan and restore the movie completely in the digital realm in resolutions that finally do the large-format 65mm source justice.

There are not much details about the single, combined Blu-Ray/DVD release – only that it will be a set with two Blu-Rays and one DVD. The second Blu-Ray reportedly will contain 90 Minutes of ‘never before seen’ archive material, but it does not look like this will be available on DVD. Keeping the old 2-disc special edition will be a good because most of the old extras including the documentary seem to have been jettisoned too – but the new release will be worth it alone for the new video and audio restoration. I’m still not sure if and when I will be getting this new release, but should it make the way into my collection, I will give it a full review.