Gold Blend commercial smoothie Anthony Head is to make a return to TV when his hit US cult show Buffy The Vampire Slayer hits terrestrial television. The BBC announced today it has signed a deal with American programme-makers Twentieth Century Fox Television to screen the horror spoof, in which Mr Head co-stars. Mr Head is best known as one half of the original Gold Blend couple, who smouldered with his screen lover Sharon Maughan in the coffee adverts. Buffy, based on a movie of the same name, has been an enormous hit in America where it is now in its third series. It follows the adventures of a 16-year-old high school student who has been gifted with the skill to hunt vampires and has already been shown by Sky in the UK. Sophie Turner Laing, the BBC's head of acquired programmes, said: "Buffy is an exciting, slick drama series - a cross between Clueless and a younger version of The X Files. "We are delighted with this acquisition which we know will thrill and entertain BBC viewers of all ages."

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As the hero of the Gold Blend coffee commercials, Tony Head pursued his beautiful female neighbour. On the West End stage, he is now exploring a very different role, playing an effete poet who kisses and caresses another man. He seems determined to leave his heart-throb image behind in the darkly erotic play Rope. Nudity, sadism and homosexuality all featured when the production opened last night at London's Wyndham's Theatre. Head limped on stage, leaning heavily on a walking stick, looking completely unlike the sophisticated yuppie of the TV ads, in a velvet suit and pussy cat bow tie. The first scene showed three naked men spreadeagled on the floor - and it quickly became clear one of them had been murdered by the other two. Head, 38, plays a blatantly gay character - a gaunt, alcoholic amateur sleuth who solves the macabre murder mystery. Since leaving the coffee ad last year, he has steered clear of traditional leading man roles. He donned suspenders and fishnet stockings as transvestite Frank'n'Furter in The Rocky Horror Show. And his role in Rope is enough to rattle the coffee cups of female fans who helped increase sales by 40% during his six-year stint as half of the Gold Blend couple.

Page created May 1999; last updated December 1999. Original material © Betsy Vera (bentley@umich.edu). This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.