Wednesday, 15th March 2017:. NOVOCASTRIA MACABRE presents an evening with Stephen Gallagher in conversation with horror author Stephen Laws. Northern Mining Institute, Neville Hall, Westgate Road, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 1SE. 7pm, tickets £3 Details and Tickets Here “An evening with Award Winning Screenwriter and Novelist Stephen Gallagher (DOCTOR WHO, CHIMERA, OKTOBER, BUGS, MURDER ROOMS,…

I’ve been following this series of plays since The Future Boys’ 2012 debut in Dead Static at Camden’s Etcetera Theatre, the classic ‘playspace over a pub’ where new talent and old hands get equal exposure. With Pilgrim Shadow and last year’s King Chaos the company moved to the Tristan Bates Theatre in London’s West End,…

  What a fantastic venue. Immediately following the talk, I’ll be offering to saw the leg off any willing volunteer.

Unused concept rough, New English Library I’ve been catching up on a couple of home-grown TV dramas that have been lurking for far too long on the PVR – no, I won’t name them – and they’ve reminded me of something I once heard David Puttnam say in an interview. He was contrasting British and…

Late one December I got a surprise phone call from Brian Clemens. It was a surprise because, although we’d met a number of times over the years and shared consultancy credits on BBC1’s BUGS, long phone chats weren’t something we really did. I wrote about it here. If you know my stuff at all you’ll…

Why does my heart sink at the prospect of a new Jonathan Creek? Because it’s a prime example of how the BBC doesn’t know how to handle a hit. They set out to make it good, and you think it’s brilliant. When they realise that, they set out to make it brilliant. And that’s when…

I’m one of a series of interviewees discussing writing and rejection on A J Ashworth’s blog. Contributors so far include Alison Moore and A L Kennedy. A sample: AA: You’ve written successfully for television (as well as for radio) many times, but I know that some of the projects you’ve worked on have failed to…

Well, no matter how long you’ve known them, your friends never lose the capacity to surprise you. Jo Armitage, with whom I worked back when I was represented by the Curtis Brown Agency, read my last entry on the British Library’s Victorian Entertainments exhibition and wrote: Well I never, just read the blog about your…

In London for a couple of meetings last Thursday, I called by to spend a few minutes at the Treasures of the British Library permanent exhibition. That’s the beauty of our free museums, as I found in the 70s when I was in the capital looking for a way into film or TV; when you’re…

Just back from a weekend of frolics, wine and conversation at 2016’s Fantasycon by the Sea in Scarborough, a town of shabby-chic Edwardian charm with a fantastic coastline and some, er, interesting after-dark streetlife. The Grand Hotel made for a highly sociable venue in a spectacular clifftop location. Dining options on the doorstep, and some…