Known for Acting
Documentary featuring a cavalcade of Northern comedy stars including the great Frank Randle, George Formby, Arthur Askey, Norman Evans and many more. The North of England has always enjoyed its own very particular brand of comedy, best seen today in Coronation Street. 80 years ago however Mancunian Studios produced feature films for the northern masses. Funny Up North tells the story of the Mancunian Studios, its eccentric owner John E Blakeley and its cavalcade of stars including such household names as Arthur Askey, Jimmy Jewell, George Formby and the legendary Frank Randle. Hosted by Professor Chris Lee, the authority on northern cinema, Funny Up North takes you on a journey from its humble beginnings to its sad demise in the 1960s.
Phineas T. Barnum and friends finance the first flight to the moon but find the task a little above them. They attempt to blast their rocket into orbit from a massive gun barrel built into the side of a Welsh mountain, but money troubles, spies and saboteurs ensure that the plan is doomed before it starts...
A half-hour sitcom, the series starred radio and theatre star Jimmy Clitheroe. Using his four-foot three-inch stature and mischievous persona to comic effect, causing further mischief and mayhem for his fictional family. It ran for one series of seven episodes in 1963.
A group of feisty, talented young performers pool their resources and buy a dilapidated theatre to showcase their acts – but unscrupulous property developers also want the theatre and resort to dirty tricks to disrupt the first night's performance!
Flatfoot Mason and his friends are the bane of the staff of the school at which Flatfoot is janitor - and where one of the pupils is Mason's long-lost daughter
Patriotic musical romance. After her school is closed, teacher Ann tries to join up. However, she is persuaded to organise a nursery for a munitions factory.
A simple handyman, who also is an amateur artist, gets into trouble when the head and shoulders portraits of some prominent local females are sold without his knowledge to an advertising agency and are published with nude bodies added to them.
