Daniel Peacock’s TV career started out brilliantly, with appearances on The Young Ones and as part of The Comic Strip Presents comedy cadre. Later, he branched out into writing and directing and seemed to specialize in high-energy, ultra-low budget shows for teenagers. The most successful of these was Cavegirl, broadcast here on Children’s BBC in the early 2000s. It was a show clearly designed to appeal to anxious teenagers, dealing rather directly with “adolescent issues”, and refracting those things middle aged folk would assume youngsters care and worry so much about through a live-action Flintstones-y aesthetic. I know people who were honest to goodness fans, but I couldn’t have seen more than five minutes of it myself.

Now, according to The Hollywood Reporter (who mistakenly date the original as coming from the 80s), Peacock’s long gestating Cagevirl movie is moving forward again and is at last set to become his debut feature film as director. Thora Birch has been rumored to star for some time (the promo poster at the top of this post is hardly new) but this is the first news of a supporting cast getting ensnared (read: this is the first indication it’s actually going to happen and Daniel Peacock can stop going from sales fest to sales fest, cap in hand).

It’s Taylor Momsen of Gossip Girl and Jacob Zachar of Greek who have reportedly also jumped on board. I don’t really know either of those shows very well… can you fill me in? Do either of these actors have any sort of fanbase at all?

The two surviving Bee Gees are apparently in negotiations to provide music which, for a Bee Gees fan like me, is at once interesting and frightening - have they released anything good in this millennium?

Apparently, the Cavegirl film has a respectably thrifty budget of $6 million and locations on South Africa. Waste not, want not says I. I wish we had more films in the $5-8 million budget range, not to mention some under-$1-million offerings.

I think Thora Birch was okay in American Beauty but great in Ghost World, so I know she can do it, no matter how off-map she seems to have shot of late. It’ll be good to see you back, Thora - even in some sort of daft fur bikini.

Commerically speaking, in the best case scenario I think this will be a medium-sized hit with the same sort of young teen that goes a bundle over, say, Twilight or Harry Potter. Scarring a genre conceit with the “inner acne” of the adolescent psyche won’t ever run out of gas.