Got to this completely accidentally, never heard about it until it was announced as coming up after yesterday's Top Gear, and the presentation sounded intriguing...

It's a movie, a co-production of HBO and the Beeb, featuring Chris O'Dowd (The IT Crowd), Dean Lennox Kelly (Shameless) and a fat bloke I never heard of (Marc Wootton) in a nice S/F spoof about, would you ever guess, Time Travel.

Well, I'm ready to admit it's not a peak of originality, but it's a parody, and parodies need to work on genre stereotypes in the first place, and, besides, it's refreshing to see an S/F movie every now and then which relies on thinking rather than the remake of a western replacing horses with spaceships and 45. colts with laser sabres...

Some criticism I read about it complained about it being "reddwarfish", but others answered with "and what's wrong with that?", with which I quite agree, we need more funny S/F, and anyway, if we take that angle, Red Dwarf itself was quite a bit "hitchhikersguidish", wasn't it?

One popular comment seems to be that there's a good idea for a TV series here, and I agree again, check it out for yourself, if you like, it's on the BBC iPlayer for the whole week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tc29d

In the end, surely not a masterpiece of the genre in itself, but could be a good pilot indeed...

And anyway, there's something strangely attractive, to me, in seeing three half-pissed blokes finding a Time-Leak (very appropriately) in the Gents at their local Pub, rather than the usual square-jawed GI Joe wrecking the Universe AND getting the girl in the end...

Well, guess a sequel was a possibility already considered, the movie is quite open-ended... and the end is perhaps my favourite bit... won't say anything more... "Bollocks!"

Still, remote a chance as it may be, I'd rather go for a TV series than more movies, me... it seems this kind of material would fare better, if expanded, into the shorter format of a sitcom, 30-45 minutes per episode, rather than more feature-lenghts, but I guess you're right in thinking movies and TV productions are completely separated departments at the Beeb, so it's rather unlikely this kind of suggestion would be considered, unfortunately.

I missed in your first post that you have never heard of Marc Wootton - He made a short lived sitcom a few years back called Cyderdelic about some inept crusties (think of the Simon Pegg 'com "Hippies" but sharper). It's very funny and well worth checking out.