James King

James King is a British film critic who presents The Movie Show on ITV2. Like Simon Mayo, King is a graduate of the University of Warwick, although unlike Simon he has not further advanced his academic career with a doctorate from the University of Made It Up. He also appears regularly on ITV London Tonight on Friday evenings and on Sky News. King was also entertainment expert on Sky One's Angela and Friends and until March 2011 was the resident film critic for BBC Radio 1.

James is a regular stand-in for Mark Kermode, who refers to him as "the boy James King". Stephen Fry was very keen to meet him after learning from Mark that King is a dead ringer for Zac Efron.

James had to walk out of the screening of Rag Tale to avoid vomiting on the floor of 20th Century Fox, something Mark delighted in telling the listeners.

It was James who identified that the characters in Eragon were taken straight out of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. He also noted that the 2008 film Choke - which Mark Kermode had been looking forward to, being based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk and starring Sam Rockwell - was essentially a reversion of the Robin Asquith Confessions Of... movies from the 1970s.

James' observation that Renée Zellweger looks like a "hamster staring at the sun" that marked the precise moment that Mark went from enjoying her work to being really annoyed by it.

Mark demanded James be fired after a row about his accommodation at the 2007 Cannes film festival. He wasn't, though (although he did have to admit that he had learned the lesson of never lying to your parents). Neither, as far as we know, was he actually struck about the head for suggesting Prime was a perfectly decent movie.

Mark also suggested James needed stern words after describing Forgetting Sarah Marshall as "brilliantly, outrageously, painfully funny." James also got told off for having his quote on the poster for Role Models describing it as - as Mark remembered it - "hilariously funny, laugh out loud, boy my sides nearly split."

When The Squid And The Whale was released on a week Mark was off and James was in, Mark went one better: he texted the programme as James was about to start his review saying "The Squid And The Whale is completely up itself and James is wrong."

On the other hand, James also got told off for being too harsh on The Ring 2 - indeed, Mark phoned in - twice - from his holiday, so outraged was he. Sometimes, a boy King just can't win.