Well, there's interesting music bio-pic casting news out of the UK. Seems that Andy Serkis, the amazing Brit character actor best known for giving life to the almost undead Gollum in the Lord of the Rings flicks, will be portraying the auteur behind the greatest rock-and-roll song of all time.

Here's Serkis, talking to www.cinemablend:

"I'm actually doing a film in April about the life of Ian Dury, who's a proto-punk rocker in the 1970s. He's an amazing character, a real poet. He sort of came up out of the British pub rock scene. He sort of pre-empted the Sex Pistols and the whole punk movement. And he was a polio sufferer, so he basically didn't have much use of his left leg or his left arm. The chance of being any kind of rock star is like zero [back then]. He was one of the first disabled punk rockers ever. I'm really looking forward to that."

The film doesn't seem to have a name yet, but it's gotten a qualified seal of approval from Mick Gallagher, the keyboardist in Dury's great backing band The Blockheads, who'll be providing music for the film. "Andy Serkis'll do a great job," Gallagher told MOJO magazine. "The script's fun but there is print-the-legend poetic licence in there, shall we say."

I'm a big fan of Dury, who was a truly beloved figure in England by the time he died in 2000, so I'll be keeping an eye on the film's progress. But I think it's a good bet that Serkis...

...will be convincing as the great man himself...

...although I'm not altogether sure how I feel about the fact they decided to cast this guy...

...to play a working class hero.

Coming tomorrow: exclusive footage of Neil Patrick Harris as Robert Smith in the forthcoming The Cure: Killing an Arab -- This Time It's Personal!