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Carol the Dabbler

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Here's the place for random bits of news about Martin Freeman.

 

From Radio Times:

 

Channel 4 certainly know how to throw a party. Just two weeks until the Stand Up To Cancer telethon, and we've been given a star-studded line-up of famous faces set to take part in this year's event.

 

... Also joining the bill are Sherlock duo Martin Freeman and Amanda Abbington who will have their "minds blown" by Derren Brown who earlier this year appeared briefly in The Empty Hearse, the opening episode of Sherlock series three.

 

Cool.  Hopefully that "mind blowing" scene will turn up on YouTube!

 

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Martin Freeman to star in Holocaust trial drama for BBC
(photo from BBC News)

_78032468_eichmannap.jpg 
 

Sherlock star Martin Freeman is to appear in a BBC2 film about the trial of one of the Second World War’s most notorious figures.
 
The actor will play TV producer Milton Fruchtman in 90-minute drama The Eichmann Show about the broadcast of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Nazis' "final solution" plan to exterminate Europe's Jews.
 
The film will also feature Anthony LaPaglia, star of US television series Without a Trace, as the TV director Leo Hurwitz.

Eichmann was captured by Israeli secret agents in Buenos Aires and transported to Israel in 1960 where he was tried a year later. He was hanged in 1962.
 
His trial was broadcast to 37 countries over four months and marked the first global TV event....

 

The Eichmann Show will be the centerpiece of a series of BBC1 and BBC2 programmes marking next year’s Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

 
You can read the entire article here.

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Here's more info on The Eichman Show from The Star (Malaysia):
 

The drama will focus on the conditions in which the trial was filmed by the American company CCBC in 1961.

Freeman, seen in the title role of The Hobbit and as Dr Watson on Sherlock, will headline the drama as Milton Fruchtman, the TV producer who acquired the broadcasting rights to the trial.

Anthony LaPaglia, of the CBS series Without A Trace, will co-star as Leo Hurwitz, the TV director who shot the images inside the courtroom.


You can read the entire article here.

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Interesting.  Hopefully that will get here stateside on the tele. I've more recently gotten into WWII history to some degree & realized recently with being 1/16 to 1/8 German Jew, I potentially had 4th cousins (closest possible relatives) live through that horror.

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Wow -- that really brings it home, doesn't it?  I don't think I watched any of the trial when it was on television, but I was well aware of it nonetheless, probably due to coverage by the daily papers.  It was major news.

 

I assume / hope there'll be a DVD eventually, and/or PBS will air it.  (Alex and I don't have cable / satellite service, so BBCAmerica would be no help to us.)

 

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yes it does.  I watched Monuments Men at the theater when it came out and a few months later some film about the Jews taken from France after the occupation by the Germans.  It was shortly after that I realized how much my family history was in some way impacted.  It had finally sunk in that I technically lost 6 million relatives (mostly very extremely distant relatives).

 

Having it on PBS would be good so you can watch it Carol.

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If I had to pick between a PBS airing and availability on DVD, I think I'd choose the latter, so I could watch it more than once -- and hopefully with extra features.  But both would be fine!  :D

 

I got curious about Milton Fruchtman (having never heard of him before), and found this 2011 interview (which includes a 1961 photo with him in it) as well as this photo of him.

 

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Wow -- Martin Freeman seems to be on a roll.  In addition to The Eichmann Show, he's also recently been cast in something called Funny Cow:
 

The Hobbit star Martin Freeman and Boardwalk Empire’s Stephen Graham are newly attached to Maxine Peake drama Funny Cow, which is due to shoot in the UK in 2015.
 
Peake, best known for her roles in British TV dramas Shameless and Silk, will lead cast in Funny Cow, which charts the rise of a stand-up comedienne in the sometimes violent and macho clubs of Northern England in the 1970’s and 80’s.

 
You can read the entire article here.

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I watched Martin's Who Do You Think You Are today and it was really good firstly it's an sad story about about his grandfather and interesting about his great-grandparents, secondly he has a brother called Benedict (not Ben, but Benedict) I was surprised at that it isn't a common name I don't think,  and thirdly he has a lovely house.  

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I've seen that show too, and found it very interesting that

his grandfather was an army doctor (killed in action, unfortunately).

 

 

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I watched that on Youtube a few weeks back.  I enjoyed it.  

And when he was looking up stuff on his grandfather, I actually knew what the millitary letters & symbols meant before they were revealed and found it interesting that he plays a character who would have had the same or similar letters & symbols on his uniform.

 

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Here's a preview of the "mind blowing" mentioned in my first post, with Derren Brown, Freeman, and Abbington:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ir5hIJWazDU

 

Note Freeman's casual Star Trek reference!

 

The entire program will be aired on BBC Channel 4 tomorrow (the 17th).  You can read the full article here.

 

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And here's the whole thing, thanks to Sherlockology:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_4t1r3B_BXo

 

So -- how'd he do it?

 

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Has any magician would say, "a good magician never reveals his tricks."  So that's how it was done.

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Filming has started on The Eichmann Show, and thanks to Radio Times, here's a photo of co-stars Anthony LaPaglia and Martin Freeman as director Leo Hurwitz and producer Milton Fruchtman, respectively:

 

59770.jpg

 

It occurred to me that Freeman is presumably doing another American accent for this role, which made me wonder what specific regional accent Mr. Fruchtman has.  Fortunately, I found this audio recording of the Peabody Awards program which honored the broadcasts of the trial (that presentation starts just a little past the halfway point), so I was able to discover that Fruchtman has a very pleasant voice with what sounds to me like a general-American accent.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Just found out that encore (encrb) is playing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Caught half way through because of TBB.

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Someone at @US_Sherlockians just tweeted that Martin is supposed to be on SNL.

 

Oh wow -- yes, it's true!

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Freeman's Saturday Night Live appearance will be on Saturday (of course) December 13th, just a few days before Battle of the Five Armies premieres -- so there will presumably be at least one Hobbit sketch.

 

I've been thinking for years that he would make a great SNL guest host.  :bouncy:

 

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For those of you who can't pull in NBC -- or who don't have a DVR and either don't want to stay up that late or would simply like to see Freeman's performance again -- Amazon sells downloads of individual SNL shows for just a couple bucks a pop.

 

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Saturday Night Live is a ninety-minute sketch program broadcast live (of course) from New York City on Saturday nights.  It's been running since 1975, though the cast of regulars has changed a number of times (with several of them going on to high-profile careers in movies and prime-time television).  They always have a celebrity guest host who opens the show with a monolog, introduces the musical guest of the week, and participates in some of the sketches.

 

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