LIV TYLER JOINS KIT HARINGTON'S 'GUNPOWDER' 17TH CENTURY TV SERIES! JACK DAVENPORT TO LEAD 'DOOMSDAY' ABC SERIES! JULIA ORMOND, JOSEPH QUIINN JOIN MATTHEW MACFADYEN'S 'HOWARD'S END' MINI SERIES

OK, people, we're back after a three day break, the longest one in our history (not that any of you lazy bastards actually noticed - which makes the spy a bit depressed), we were without internet, but I do have delish news, beginning with new casting update for GUN POWDER epic mini series which I announced last winter. Joining Kit Harington in the lead role are now Liv Tyler and Mark Gattis!

It will be the story of GUN POWDER Plot, the 1605 attempt by a group of provincial English Catholics to blow up the House of Lords and kill King James I in order to help restore a Catholic to the throne. The plot was foiled on November 5 when authorities at Westminster Palace found Guy Fawkes guarding the explosives. While he played a pivotal role, Fawkes did not devise the plan. The man behind it was Robert Catesby(Harington), a 30 year old Warwickshire gentleman and committed Catholic at a time when Protestant England persecuted the church’s members relentlessly. Harington, who is a direct descendant of Catesby, is also producing!

Meanwhile, another of our fave epic stars, always delightful Jack Davenport has been cast by American ABC to lead the pilot for their DOOMSDAY about U.S. government's secret think tank featuring the most creative minds in science and entertainment that is tasked with dreaming up man made disaster scenarios and their possible solutions. When a catastrophe occurs that’s ripped from the pages of the missing doomsday book, the team is brought back to work to prevent the disasters of their own making. Davenport will play Warren, a well-known intellectual playwright turned middle brow action screenwriter. Member of the former Doomsday Project think tank, he is imaginative and creative and sees the world like a story which helps him think like (and even empathize with) the enemy.

I announced last week that BBC and Starz are going to produce period set mini TV series on HOWARD'S END with Matthew MacFadyen and now we have new cast members including Joseph Quinn(whom we fell in love with in Dickensian), Julia Ormond and Alex Lawther among others!

Telling the story of two couples caught in a swirling landscape of social and class divisions in turn of the century England, the four part series focuses on Margaret Schlegel (Hayley Atwell), an idealistic, woman who is courted by the older Henry Wilcox (Matthew Macfadyen), a conservative businessman, after his wife Ruth Wilcox (Julia Ormond) dies unexpectedly. Meanwhile, Margaret’s passionate and capricious younger sister Helen Schlegel (PhilippaCoulthard) takes up the cause of Leonard Bast (Joseph Quinn), a young bank clerk who falls on hard times at work and at home with his partner Jacky (Rosalind Eleazar). In the absence of their parents, who have died, the sisters’ loving but interfering Aunt Juley (Tracey Ullman) tries to keep the young ladies and their brother Tibby (Alex Lawther) on the straight and narrow.