The nominations for the 2002 British Academy Awards were announced this morning...  

The BAFTA ceremony will take place on Sunday February 24 at the Odeon Leicester Square...  

The Carl Foreman Award for the most promising newcomer to British Film

Steve Coogan/Henry Normal - writers: The Parole Officer

Julian Fellowes - writer: Gosford Park

Joel Hopkins/Nicola Usbourne - director/producer: Jump Tomorrow

Ruth Kenley-Letts - producer: Strictly Sinatra

Jack Lothian - writer: Late Night Shopping

After countless hours spent toiling over the truckloads of voting forms submitted by our readers, the nominations for the 2002 Empire Awards can finally be announced... 

The awards themselves will take place at London's Dorchester Hotel on Tuesday February 5...

Best British Film

by Euan Carmichael

The transition from TV to film is a torturous road for the majority of British comedians. Can someone who we are usually fed in half-hour bites really hold our attention for 90 minutes? Evidence suggests not, as the likes of Harry Enfield and Lenny Henry will testify to, but in The Parole Officer Steve Coogan does his damnedest to reverse the trend. Already boasting a résumé bursting with a plethora of character creations Coogan might just be the one to successively complete the massive leap. That's not to say he's the finished article, but there is more than enough evidence in this comedy-thriller to suggest that a bright future in film may lie ahead for the man who unleashed Alan Partridge on the world.

The plot of The Parole Officer reads like that of a big-budget Hollywood thriller. Parole officer, although being set in Britain should it not be 'probation officer', Simon Garden (Coogan) witnesses bent copper DI Burton (Stephen Dillane) committing a murder. Simon is framed for the crime and the only evidence to prove his innocence is a security tape locked away in a bank vault. With the help of the only three ex-cons that he managed to reform, Simon devises a daring plan to retrieve the tape. The film is never played as straight as the plot suggests it should, but director Duigan maintains enough urgency throughout the film to deter events from becoming farcical. This is a serious story played out by amusing characters.

In many ways The Parole Officer is one of the better examples of recent years at combining the comedy and thriller elements in the right proportions. Only the occasional diversion upsets the balance, most notably the roller coaster scene, which appears tacked on as an after thought to appeal to the gross-out brigade. It's a shame that this scene features heavily in the films marketing, because the film is anything but a gross-out fest for the Scary Movie audience. Sure it contains a fair element of smut and toilet humour, but it is often used to actually help characters develop. The prime example is the ladies toilet scene, which establishes Simon as an individual that is both quick thinking and cool under pressure. The film also boasts a terrifically paced final act that manages to somehow tie-up every plot strand with the help of an unexpected cameo.

Performance wise the film boasts an excellent supporting cast. The three ex-cons form a likeable trio with Miller's camp computer wiz Colin, the 'C3-PO' of the group if you like, as the stand out. But Puri as convicted bigamist and Beach Boys loving George, and Waddington's dim-witted Jeff are not starved of their own memorable moments. Not to mention Dillane's suitably nasty and overly arrogant villain. The females in the piece are also given decent roles with Headey making a pleasant love interest and young Emma Williams impressing as the rebellious teen Kirsty who becomes a vital part of Simon's team.

The strength of the supporting cast perhaps reflects some reservations over the ability of Coogan to carry the movie. In his first lead role he falls a tad short, but offers enough to suggest that he has the talent to succeed in the future. The problem is perhaps not with Coogan himself, but with the character of Simon Garden. Simon is not your super cool one-liner dispensing hero, but neither is he your bumbling and clumsy misfit that Ben Stiller plays so effectively. No Simon is somewhere in the middle; an intelligent man who's slightly pompous, but with has his heart in the right place. Ultimately though, he is an anorak wearing geek who has the occasional tendency to irritate. Yet credit must go to Coogan for making Simon a genuinely likeable character. The other problem with Coogan is that his humour is not as instantly accessible as that of other comedians. Coming more in the form of slight mannerisms than out-and-out slapstick, it is a degree of humour that slowly grows on you. Coogan fans however will be chuffed to see more than a sprinkling of Alan Partridge in the films protagonist.

Despite a slight lag in the middle and a couple of ill-judged set pieces, The Parole Officer is an amusing, entertaining and often very clever movie. With an engaging and likeable cast, as well as an excellent finale, this is one of the better British flicks to be released in recent years. And as a film funded by the National Lottery, it at least reassures us that not all of the lottery funds are being flushed down the pan.

The Parole Officer John Duigan 94 MINS, 12

by Jonathan Romney

Cinephiles like to reminisce about the great canon of British cinema - Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, Ealing and Gainsborough, and Get Carter or whatever else is the latest rediscovered icon of Seventies austerity chic. But as an apprentice moviegoer in the early 1970s, I quickly learned what British cinema really was - whatever a U or A certificate would allow me to get into at the local ABC. Invariably, it was something dreadful - most often, throwaway caper comedies such as Crooks and Coronets, a lark involving First World War biplanes, which I remember only because the poster featured the exchange "It's a Fokker!" - "You can say that again!" (A flick through Halliwell's reveals that it starred Telly Savalas, Harry H Corbett and Dame Edith Evans - dream cast or what?).

Thirty years on, British cinema seems hardly to have changed. The big film of the week is another cheerful heist comedy, The Parole Officer, and again the most memorable thing about it may turn out to be the poster, with its blurbs printed so that they scream the hidden message "FULL! BLOW! JOB! SCENE!"

The best you can say about The Parole Officer is that it's good-natured. The worst is that this is the debut film vehicle for Steve Coogan, who's capable of so much more - as is director John Duigan, who once made the Australian coming-of-age diptych The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. The tameness of The Parole Officer illustrates the current difference between television and film in Britain. On television, Coogan is able to make trenchant character comedy with a satirical edge: monsters like Alan Partridge or Gareth Cheeseman at once make us cringe and put the knife into our own cultural prejudices. However, that approach assumes a certain intelligence in the audience, an assumption the British film industry is habitually reluctant to make. So on the big screen, Coogan settles for featherweight farce - as pointless a waste of talent as it would be to book the cast of The Royle Family for a remake of Carry On Camping.

Coogan, who co-scripted with regular collaborator Henry Normal, plays bumbling hero Simon Garden, who witnesses a murder committed by a bent copper (Stephen Dillane, whose repellent smoothie is much the classiest turn here). There's evidence on video, but the tape is locked in a bank, so Garden undertakes a heist, aided by three former parole "clients" turned upright citizens - councillor Om Puri, punch-drunk fishmonger Steven Waddington and computer whiz Ben Miller - together with a teenage car thief (promisingly no-nonsense Emma Williams).

Although briskly executed, the story never feels more than a frame for the sight gags and set-pieces. Much of the humour seems a cavalier attempt to squeeze in some Farrelly Brothers grossness - a perfunctory number with a small dog and severed head, a rollercoaster ride staged purely so that Coogan can throw up on some schoolkids, and some japing with a statue's detachable penis, a routine vindicated only by a scene-stealing double-take by Spaced's Simon Pegg.

Despite the high-octane cast, no-one gets a chance for solo riff; no democratic Ealing spirit here. Lena Headey has little to do but smile encouragingly as a sensible but sexy WPC. The film is tailored to place Coogan at the centre, but his Simon is barely a character, just a collection of random traits: well-meaning but pompous; inept yet an executive mastermind; hypoglycaemic, so obliged to eat a lot of crisps; a Deep Purple bore; not to mention something of a homophobe, terrified of prison because of what might happen in the showers. At one point, Miller asks, "Why are we putting ourselves out for a man who wears corduroy trousers?" - which sums up the film's lazy reliance on our current cultural shorthand of what makes a person "sad". Yet, however ridiculous Garden is, he's never allowed not to be endearing; it comes as a shock to realise how badly Coogan wants to be loved. Garden is a nervous buffoon most of the time, but a capable wit and confident flirt when it suits. When, admiring a priapic statue, Headey asks him if he's afraid to touch a penis, he replies, "You're talking to a man who's going blind." Not bad - except that it's a Woody Allen kind of line, and entirely out of character for Simon.

Naturally, the gang's charmingly amateurish DIY tactics, more Blue Peter than Mission: Impossible, win the day. It's all done in the same self- effacing "gosh, we're gauche" British spirit as Notting Hill and Bridget Jones - though this posture is nothing if not obliquely self-aggrandising, the subtext being that we're so smart we don't have to talk ourselves up like the Yanks.

LONDON (Variety) - British TV comic Steve Coogan makes a likable transition to the big-screen in ``The Parole Officer,'' a small-scale and eventually enjoyable character comedy in which an inept rehabilitation official stages a bank heist to clear his name of a frame-up.

Though pic takes a while to find its feet and establish a rhythm, it has the potential for good midscale business on home turf; offshore, where Coogan's name is not known, film will need careful marketing to find an audience.

Coogan is best known in Blighty for his small-screen alter ego, Alan Partridge, a pompous, opinionated chat show host who constantly puts down his guests but is also prone to making himself look equally stupid. Coogan's big-screen parole officer, though several notches less arrogant, is largely cast in the same mold and relies on the actor's particular brand of slightly goofy comedy, rather like a distant cousin of Mr. Bean. Audiences unfamiliar with his TV persona may take a while to tune into his low-key style and stumbling, double-take delivery.

Coogan plays Simon Garden, a klutzy parole officers from Blackpool, northwest England, who has rehabilitated only three criminals in his entire career. Transferred to nearby Manchester, he's almost immediately embroiled in trouble, witnessing a cop, Burton (Stephen Dillane), strangling the accountant of a nightclub owner (Clive Kneller) who's been running a cocaine scam with Burton.

Burton realizes Garden witnessed the murder and frames him for it. But while on the run, Garden remembers the killing was caught on a CCTV monitor and sets out to retrieve the tape, now deposited in a high-tech bank vault by the nightclub owner. To help him break in, he rounds up the three former criminals he once successfully rehabilitated: a Indian serial bigamist (Om Puri), a computer hacker (Ben Miller) and a former boxer-cum-fishmonger (Steven Waddington). Hardly the ideal team, they're subsequently joined by Kirsty (Emma Williams), a young druggie joyrider who has a score to settle with Burton.

It's around this point that the movie starts to click into gear as the character comedy warms up during scenes of the klutzy quintet rehearsing for the heist. Up to this point, the film's rhythm has been somewhat stop-go, not helped by rather workaday direction by John Duigan and a habit of stopping the plot for elaborate comic set pieces -- one on a roller coaster, another in a museum -- which basically revolve around a single joke in TV sketch style.

Pic finally finds its feet soon after as the bank robbery swings into action -- a third act that is cleverly paced, makes hay from character interplay and is given a real boost by Alex Heffes' big-scale orchestral score (with nods to ``The Magnificent Seven'') that plays against the basically small-scale action.

Final reels, which include a delightful cameo by Omar Sharif (billed only in the end crawl), have a celebratory charm that's capped by a joyfully loony last sequence.

Though much of the film revolves round the persona of Coogan, who co-scripted with his regular TV collaborator, Henry Normal, overall it's more of an ensemble piece than a one-man showcase -- and better for it. Puri, Waddington and Miller blend well as the three left-footed crims, and Dillane, especially, is splendid as the smooth, smiling police villain.

Lena Headey is somewhat under-used as a cop who falls for Garden's shy charm (and the script never makes a convincing case for her attraction), but she comes through stronger as the pic progresses. Jenny Agutter has a tiny role that's almost a throwaway.

Tech credits are OK, with no special gloss.

Simon Garden ................. Steve Coogan

Emma ......................... Lena Headey

Detective-Inspector Burton ... Stephen Dillane

George ....................... Om Puri

Jeff ......................... Steven Waddington

Colin ........................ Ben Miller

Sarah ........................ Jenny Agutter

Kirsty ....................... Emma Williams

Victor Bonderenko ............ Omar Sharif

With: Justin Burrows, Clive Kneller, John Henshaw.

A UIP (in U.K.)/Universal Focus (in U.S.) release of a DNA Films presentation, in association with Universal Pictures Intl. and the Film Council, of a Figment/Toledo Pictures production. Produced by Duncan Kenworthy, Andrew Macdonald, Callum McDougall.

Directed by John Duigan. Screenplay, Steve Coogan, Henry Normal. Camera (Technicolor), John Daly; editor, David Freeman; music, Alex Heffes; production designer, Tom Brown; art director, Sue Booth; costume designer, Alex Caulfield; sound (Dolby Digital), John Midgely; stunt coordinator, Gareth Milne; additional camera, Ken Westbury, Graham Frake; assistant director, Sean Guest; casting, Michelle Guish. Reviewed at UIP screening room, London, July 2, 2001.

Reuters/Variety REUTERS

What is it about the words 'British comedy thriller'? Hearing them has the same effect as a white-coated specialist sitting down next to you with some X-rays in his hand and saying: 'I'm afraid the news is not good. We shall have to run some more tests, but there is every likelihood that this is going to be a British 'heist' comedy, partly funded by the Film Council.'

Watching The Parole Officer a movie co-written by and starring Steve Coogan, one of television's most brilliant comic talents reminded me of going to north London's long-defunct Hendon Odeon as a child in the 1970s and seeing a British film called The Optimists, starring Peter Sellers. Somehow its sheer depressing Britishness seemed to suck the life out of Sellers: something about the British daylight, the British locations, the overcast British sky and the echoing British dialogue in that big old empty Odeon were the polar opposite of Exciting America, where Sellers had been such a huge star, and where he was to climb to greatness again in Being There.

There is no reason why Steve Coogan should not one day make it big in the movies like Sellers, or John Cleese, and every hope that he can avoid the horrible fate of Lenny Henry in True Identity or Rik Mayall in Drop Dead Fred. He has been a writer and performer of genius, and his co-writer Henry Normal is, similarly, formidably talented. The narrative arc of Alan Partridge, from On the Hour through The Day Today to I'm Alan Partridge, was a stunning feat of character development, a rise and fall of incredible comic richness and scope, easily surpassing Basil Fawlty in its detail and creative ambition.

And why? Because it was so horribly real. Every wince-inducing misjudged joke, every gauche lechery, every maladroit put-down, every fervent parochial snobbery was authentically drawn from real, modern life.

But The Parole Officer is as real and modern as a nine-shilling note. Absolutely nothing in it is believable. It's like something by the old Children's Film Foundation, or an episode of Rentaghost or The Press Gang. The film is about a bank robbery, which is a quaint archaism in itself, bank robberies having lost their currency in fact and fiction some 20 or 30 years ago, and culminates in the gang getting away on bicycles stored in the back of a van, a very twee Italian Job. For all its good points, the miasma of depressing British-film-comedyness hangs over it like a cloud: that municipal building they use with its real name obscured by a temporary-looking sign saying 'West Clyde Bank' sowing a major seed of melancholy doubt.

Coogan plays Simon Garden, a parole officer in Blackpool, a location apparently chosen simply for a sight gag of Coogan being explosively sick on someone on a roller coaster, though without the embarrassing aftermath and apologies that would have made it funny. He is a slight, boyish figure in T-shirt and jeans, whose colleagues loathe him so much he has to move to Manchester. This is where he accidentally and what a shedload of narrative licence being used and abused begins with that 'accidentally' witnesses a crooked copper kill a dodgy accountant and Coogan has the crime pinned on him. So he recruits his only three non-recidivist criminal-clients to help him rob the bank where a CCTV tape is stored which would exonerate him.

Director John Duigan does a sturdy job and The Parole Officer actually has an embarrassment of riches in its cast. Stephen Dillane is excellent as the dodgy copper who menaces Coogan. ('I'm a parole officer! You can't intimidate me!' 'Let me give it a shot.') Om Puri is George, one of Simon's dodgy crime trio, and Ben Miller is Colin, on whose querulous computer expertise depends what passes for the film's credibility vis-a-vis bypassing the bank's alarm system. So stuffed with talent is The Parole Officer that it has Simon Pegg in a tiny, almost subliminal role.

Then there are the gags: two or three really good ones, largely when Coogan sheds the goofy image and lashes out with Partridgean spite. 'I can't believe people are talking at the back,' he snaps while addressing a stunned crowd, holding someone at gunpoint. But it has to be said: considering what a master Coogan is at creating beautifully detailed and differentiated characters, Simon is a bit of a dull leading man.

There are lots of feelgood borrowings: a bit of Farrelly brothers, a hint of Full Monty in the blokes in the northern front room, and Puri's presence brings in a trace- memory of East is East. But it doesn't have the Ealing comedies' innocence which might have excused the kids-TV level of realism. Coogan is a TV comedy superstar; he could get run over by a bus tomorrow and his place in the Hall of Fame would still be assured. But this isn't the big-screen crossover we were hoping for.

There is a telling moment in John Duigan’s British crime caper The Parole Officer. Towards the end, the main character, the incompetent parole officer Simon Garden, played by the comedian Steve Coogan, has to pull off a climactic unmasking of the villain in a crowded town hall. Tension builds. To ensure that he is heard out, Garden has a gun trained at a policewoman’s head. Most of Manchester’s police force is in attendance, and he has everybody’s undivided attention. Well, almost everybody.

Halfway through, Garden is forced to break off and yell irritably: “I can’t believe people are still talking at the back.” Garden says this with all the painful pettiness of a provincial sociology teacher, whose class just won’t quieten down and, hey, give the subject a chance. Classic, hilarious and everything else, but still you can’t help but wonder how it will play in Philadelphia.

Indeed, Garden letting his gun dangle by his side and ticking off the noisy witnesses in the town hall is both one of The Parole Officer’s funniest moments and its bravest ones. Simply because it confirms your suspicions that, like Tony Hancock’s The Rebel, the makers might have had big ideas about pandering shamelessly to the American market (The Parole Officer has an astonishing amount of “action!” and more than its fair share of car chases, considering it’s a low-key British movie). But, ultimately, Duigan (Flirting, Lawn Dogs) and his cast just seem determined to get it right.

For this we must probably also thank leading man and co-scriptwriter Coogan (working with his longtime collaborator, Henry Normal). Coogan is the British comedian who makes Hancock look slapdash and carefree about his work, and whose comedy relies on the fact that he is able to land precisely on to trip-wires of character and suggestion which activate the humour, rather than slap bang on to the jokes themselves.

As Coogan is something of an SAS comedian — you don’t even know he’s there, you don’t even realise that he’s delivered the joke, until he’s done it and moved on — I was interested to see how his signature subtlety and attention to detail would translate to the crass, obvious, visually greedy big screen.

Unsurprisingly, considering Coogan’s past form, the most obvious comparisons for The Parole Officer are all British — namely old Ealing comedies (though that’s generous: for all its attributes, The Parole Officer clatters along, rather than flowing seamlessly), those Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness movies which spun off one man’s bungling Everyman innocence, and the ill-starred attempts of Hancock and Morecambe and Wise to break into international cinema. Well, I say “ill-starred” but, for all that these movies were considered massive flops and the artists involved retreated, humbled and burnt, I must say I always laughed like a burst drain.

Which is maybe Duigan and Coogan’s biggest challenge. Sorry to keep kicking the sore spot, guys, but British comedy makes British people laugh and, save for the over-rated, sentimental Full Monty, could it seriously hope to translate to America? The basic plot of The Parole Officer definitely isn’t going to garner any awards for originality. The well-meaning but hopeless Garden witnesses a murder perpetrated by crooked police officers, led by a deliciously nasty Stephen Dillane, who then proceeds to frame Garden for the crime. Garden has to rob a bank wherein lies a videotape which will clear his name. To do this, he enlists the help of the only three criminals he has ever rehabilitated: George, a serial bigamist (“I just like weddings”) played by the veteran Indian actor Om Puri; Steven Waddington’s burly, gormless Jeff; and computer hacker and Belgian trance-dance fan Colin (Ben Miller, of the comedy team Armstrong and Miller).

Also featured are the teenage joy-rider Kirsty (a decisive debut by Emma Williams), Lena Headey’s friendly policewoman, Omar Sharif’s criminal Victor (“A master of disguise”) and various grunting heavies. Far from being macho, Garden is always desperate to avoid getting a beating, to the point of attempting to bribe his assailants. “In my wallet, I’ve got £40,” he tells a dastardly duo.

“That’s twenty each.”

Here, one realises, is a decent, honest man, who has wandered into a situation he can’t handle. To illustrate further, Garden’s PIN number is the date of the Battle of Hastings, the tiles in his kitchen feature sheaves of corn, he wears pinnies to cook and he works out the bank robbery on a wipe-clean “Things To Do” board. As Miller’s character says: “Why are we putting ourselves on the line for a man who wears corduroy trousers?” On the downside, it’s slightly irritating that The Parole Officer is a crime-based caper (America is going to end up assuming that our culture is more lawless than their own) and at times the humour becomes tediously lavatorial (there’s an overlong sequence involving Garden vomiting on a rollercoaster). Moreover, it has to be said that the aura of The Parole Officer is definitely more “televisual” and local than it is cinematic and international. Then again, in British terms, this could be considered a plus (nobody could deny that our TV comedy is better than our movie comedy).

Nor is the involvement of producer Duncan Kenworthy (Four Weddings, Notting Hill) a problem. No big American actress strolls in to fall in love with Garden (considering the state of his anorak, it’s enough of a stretch that he manages to attract Headey), and there are no crass attempts to prettify the dark and dour beauty of Manchester.

Most crucially of all, what Garden definitely isn’t is Alan Partridge-Lite, though many might claim that the ghost of the Pringle-wearing sports presenter haunts every scene. If anything, Garden exudes the beleaguered loser vibe of Steve Martin circa Planes, Trains and Automobiles (although obviously not as zany).

However, overall, Coogan seems to be using The Parole Officer to assess his own comic boundaries, which is an ambitious experiment to say the least. Indeed, some might say that sending such a deeply analytical artist as Coogan into the world of cinema and expecting it to work is a bit like sending a chess master into a cage and expecting the lion not to eat him. The odd thing is that, in many ways, the lion does eat him. And it still works.

The Parole Officer
Odeon, West End
12, 94mins

Few television comedians manage to become film stars, and fewer still succeed outside their home turf. But The Parole Officer should serve lengthy time at the British box-office on the strength of Steve Coogan's huge popularity as a stand-up comic and small-screen character actor, compounded by the anticipation attending his first major film role. A sunny future domestically also awaits on video further down the line.

Lacking major international names in the supporting cast, the film's overseas prospects are more uncertain (though there is an amusing cameo from an unbilled Omar Sharif). Still, Coogan's own profile may rise after the release of 24 Hour Party People early next year, Michael Winterbottom's forthcoming film about the vibrant Manchester music scene from the late 1970s to early 1990s, in which Coogan takes the lead role. Certainly The Parole Officer represents a much sturdier commercial prospect for DNA Films following the company's disappointing debut production Beautiful Creatures.

Coogan could easily have chosen to spin a feature-length character out of one of his successful TV sketch personae: the yobbish Paul Calf, smarmy lounge singer Tony Ferrino or the blazer-wearing failed talkshow host Alan Partridge. Instead, he has created a new alter ego who bears a recognisable resemblance to his stablemates but is considerably more likeable and credible than his predecessors in the Coogan canon.

Like them, Simon Garden is a mildly irritating loser: a well-meaning but nerdy probation officer who has only ever rehabilitated three prisoners in his entire career and who, forcibly relocated from the seaside resort of Blackpool to the tough big city of Manchester, finds himself slightly out of his depth in these murkier waters.

His mettle is put to the test when a crooked police chief (Stephen Dillane) frames him for murder and he is forced to prove his innocence by robbing a bank vault containing an incriminating CCTV surveillance video. To do so, he urges his three reformed crooks (Om Puri, Ben Miller and Steven Waddington) to return temporarily to a life of crime, much to their reluctance and astonishment. Also along for the ride is one of Simon's new clients, a feisty teenage ramraider (Emma Williams). The central gag is the idea of a klutz from the Social Services attempting Secret Service style derring-do, and Coogan proves himself fully up to the exacting physical demands of the role, performing many of his own stunts.

Most of the hit-and-miss humour relies heavily on pratfalls and slapstick and is definitely on the unsophisticated side: in one typical scene, for instance, Simon breaks the oversized phallus off a fertility statue in an exhibition of erotic art, and escapes detection by faking acute diarrhoea in the gallery toilet. Some inconsistencies in the plotting also suggest that Coogan and co-writer Henry Normal haven't yet mastered the move from sketch-length to feature-film scripts.

As Coogan himself remarks of Simon: "You'd buy him a drink but you wouldn't want to spend the whole evening with him," and the film wisely does not allow itself to become a one-man-show. Heavyweight dramatic actors such as Puri and Dillane bring heft to the secondary roles, while Lena Headey, in her first major comic turn, projects a cool intelligence as the film's romantic interest, a sexy policewoman who finds herself drawn to Simon's unlikely charms. John Duigan's direction gives all these actors the space to develop the relations between the seven or eight major characters.

Dir: John Duigan. UK. 2001. 90 mins.