Bernard and the Genie

Bernard and the Genie
Title caption featuring the lamp
Directed by	Paul Weiland
Produced by	Jacinta Peel Peter Fincham Mary Francis
Written by	Richard Curtis
Starring	Lenny Henry Alan Cumming Rowan Atkinson Denis Lill Angie Clarke
Music by	Howard Goodall
Cinematography	Roger Pratt
Editing by	Ian Weil
Distributed by	BBC
Release date(s)	23 November 1991
Running time	70 min
Language	English

Bernard and the Genie is a seventy-minute British TV movie co-produced by Attaboy and Talkback for BBC Television. It was first shown on BBC1 on 23 November 1991. Written by comedy writer Richard Curtis, this comic fantasy takes its inspiration from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights and follows Alan Cumming as art dealer Bernard Bottle who is not having a good day.

Sacked by his avaricious boss (Rowan Atkinson) and jilted by his girlfriend, Bernard unintentionally discovers the antique lamp he was given one Christmas actually contains Josephus (Lenny Henry), a real life genie, imprisoned for the last 2000 years for accidentally killing an evil wizard's daughter whilst moonlighting as a knife-thrower.

While Bernard and Josephus struggle to come to terms with their new lives ("At least your girlfriend is buried in the arms of her lover. Mine is buried in an artichoke patch in Jerusalem!"), their attempts to cheer themselves up using magic have unforeseen consequences.

Directed by Paul Weiland, the movie featured actors such as John Gabriel (as the evil wizard), and Denis Lill (as lift attendant Frank Kepple), as well as cameos from Melvyn Bragg, Bob Geldof, Vincent Hanna, Gary Lineker and Trevor McDonald.

A DVD version of the movie was released for Region 1 on 4 September 2007.^[1]

References

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External links

• Bernard and the Genie at the Internet Movie Database

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