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Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy (2)
UPDATE: Check out Andy Greenwood’s contribution to the comments section on the original post. Apparently the Laurel and Hardy collection exists in two forms, and Amazon withdrew the set from sale for a while due to a customer complaint about the goods as described. As far as I can see it’s a packaging issue and…
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Pipe Bursts
True story. The late ’70s weren’t exactly the biplane-and-barnstorming days of television technology, although looking back from today it can sometimes seem like it. In Granada TV’s Presentation Department we ran traffic control on live feeds both from network and our own studios, analog VT from two-inch tape, and an array of telecine machines that…
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Terriers
By one means or another I try to keep up with at least the pilots of the new crop of each season’s US TV shows, and in the current season one’s been the standout for me – Terriers, from FX, starring Donal Logue (who I thought was miscast in Life but is perfect here) and…
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Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy
I don’t often do this, but there’s an insane price for the complete Laurel and Hardy collection on Amazon right now; the boxed set originally retailed around two hundred quid. It includes foreign-language versions of some of the shorts made for export, with different supporting casts and, in some cases, extra routines and material. Plus,…
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Theatre Ghosts
How cool is this: the late Ian Richardson steps in to haunt the refurbished RSC theatre.
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This Wednesday
A shout-out for Ellen ‘Audrey Deux’, singing with Sunday’s Child at the Cobden Club in Notting Hill this Wednesday evening. From the club’s website: Nottinghill’s local DJ/Producer Alistair hosts “Hoochie Coochie live Club” Every week 4 to 5 of London’s finest and best acts (both signed & unsigned) from acoustic singer-songwriters to soul/jazz to ska…
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Super Duper 8
I spent last Friday morning in the BBC’s number 4 grading suite at the Television Centre in London. For a while I’d been looking for some way of digitising the Super 8 that I shot in the late ’70s and ’80s, but there was always a problem. For all its reputation as a ‘bootlace gauge’,…
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In Sickness and in Stealth
Back in 1984 I travelled through Finland and Russia to research the book that would eventually become The Boat House. I say eventually because it was a far from easy road. Not the travelling, that was an adventure that I wouldn’t have missed for anything. Helsinki, Joensuu, Savonlinna, the towns of Western Karelia… then onto…