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Australian thriller The Secrets She Keeps, currently airing on BBC One and iPlayer, takes the audience to a very dark place says Laura Carmichael. Her character Agatha, a supermarket worker who befriends a pregnant blogger, ‘does such unbelievable things, the most irresponsible things’ driven ‘by the impulse of motherhood’.

Building a crime thriller around that impulse makes the series relatable, says Carmichael. At its heart, the show is about ‘wanting to be a mum and wanting to be the perfect mum.’ As her character’s backstory unfolds, ‘you understand her’ says Carmichael, though ‘she absolutely puts people through hell.’ Whether Agatha could ever be forgiven, she says, is a question for the audience to mull.

There’s no talk of a second series as yet for The Secret She Keeps. ‘It was taken from the book, which stands alone,’ Carmichael explains, ‘but it would be great to revisit and see what would happen.

Animation director on the Beatles film Yellow Submarine

The animation director Jack Stokes, who has died aged 92, had an energetic career that lasted more than 50 years, of which the highlight was his work on the Beatles' groundbreaking animated feature film Yellow Submarine (1968).

Jack's connection with the Fab Four was first established in 1965, when the London animation studio Tvc was commissioned to produce an animated television series The Beatles. It was a great ratings success in the Us, although it was never shown in the UK. Made to the typical standards of TV cartoons at that time, it showed no hint of what was to come with the feature film.

He was contacted by the Beatles again to do the animated titles and inserts on their Magical Mystery Tour film, which aired on the BBC on Boxing Day 1967. The following year came Yellow Submarine: there was barely a script to work from,...

The only thing to kick the Monday morning blues right in the face is here, the latest episode of the Mouth Off podcast hits the internet.

Up for discussion this week is the Harald Zwart’s remake of the classic (?) 80s film The Karate Kid, this time starring Jaden Smith and the Jackie Chan. Bleeding Cool’s Movie Man Brendon Connelly, Craig Skinner and I take off the rose tints and stare deeply into the abyss of the latest remake to hit our screens.

Craig returns triumphant from Montreal to bring us all the news from Fantasia Fest and we also look ahead to FrightFest, so plenty to pleasure you aurally this week, as well as our resident Ripped from the Crypt section which this week takes as a theme films which mix animation with live action.

Click here to subscribe or listen to the Mouth Off feed in iTunes,...

Tim Burton tampers with the children's classic to his cost in this lifeless reimagining of Lewis Carroll's book

Tim Burton is in love with the Victorian age. His childhood idol was Vincent Price, who started out playing Prince Albert on stage, specialised in Victorian morbidity and made one of his final screen appearances in Burton's Edward Scissorhands. Burton's last film, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was a bracing excursion into Victorian melodrama, and it was inevitable that his interest in mythology and the adolescent imagination would eventually attract him to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Appropriately his London office was once the home of Arthur Rackham, who succeeded Sir John Tenniel as Alice's illustrator.

The characters, language, puzzles and predicaments of Carroll's 1865 novel and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, became and remain part of the texture of our lives, as embedded as ancient mythology and more endearing.

Sad news to end the week on tonight. The actor and director Lionel Jeffries has died at the age of 83.

He’ll be a familiar face to those of us who watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang endlessly, his role as the eccentric and irrepressible Grandpa Potts was a huge part of the buoyancy and charm of the film and he contributes hugely to its timeless appeal.

Jeffries was also well known as a director, bringing the children’s classic The Railway Children to the screen in 1970, he also wrote the screenplay and it is perhaps the most enduring of his films.

I didn’t realise this until tonight but he was also behind the camera of the 1978 adaptation of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, which is a strange and, at times, haunting film yet full of joy in its mix of live action and animation. Both films are worth a watch,...

Prolific actor and director who made the much-loved film The Railway Children

As an actor Lionel Jeffries, who has died aged 83, was a master of comic unease. This was perhaps fuelled by the personal unease he felt in a sex-and-violence era which overtook the gentler sensibilities he sometimes brought to his acting. But he was able to bring these sensibilities fully to bear in his scriptwriting and film directing, particularly in his much-loved adaptation of the classic children's novel The Railway Children. With the latter, he left an indelible mark on the British film industry and generations of teary-eyed viewers.

The son of two devoted workers for the Salvation Army, Jeffries disliked personal publicity and was a zealot when preparing a role (he ran two miles every morning before appearing in the musical Hello Dolly! after an absence from the London stage of 26 years). He deplored permissivism, and was not...

Would we have had Alien, Planet of the Apes and The Time Machine if it weren't for a certain bearded Victorian?

Darwin, Evolution and the Movies is a one-off festival of film and live comedy to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859.

Over this weekend the festival is running at three separate venues across London. Classic films you rarely get a chance to see on the big screen, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and brand new shorts commissioned as part of Darwin200 make up this small but perfectly formed festival.

If Darwin had chickened out in 1859 and decided to put his dusty manuscript back in the drawer, allowing Alfred Russel Wallace to take the fame, and the flack, the genre of science fiction that we take for granted probably would not have evolved to become the seductive, cultural force that it is.