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.