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My Favourite Headline
Some headlines just stick in your mind. Like BUDGIE DIES IN FIRE, from the Bolton Chronicle. The Chronicle was the local freesheet that was pushed through our letterbox once a week back when I was living in Bolton and working in Manchester. It featured several pages of classified ads filled out with a minumum of…
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Chimera on DVD
From Revelation Films with a launch date of May 24th, if you’re interested… Chimera wasn’t my first TV work but it was the one that upshifted my career and spoiled me for anything less than big-budget ‘event’ TV. Few official details yet but the product description reads, First broadcast on British TV in 1991, Chimera…
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Writers Who Direct
In Conversation: A Writer’s Perspective is a projected series of author interviews edited by James Cooper. Volume One is available now and is a publication of The British Fantasy Society. Contributors include Joe Lansdale, Graham Joyce, Ramsey Campbell, Mark Morris, and Tim Lebbon. My conversation with James was in the form of a series of…
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L A Song
I’m trying not to worry, but when the kid came to visit I caught her measuring up my apartment.
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The End of the Road
If I see a worse film than 2012 this year it’ll only be because Roland Emmerich rushes out another one… not that it wasn’t well-made on every technical level, but it was of an order of dumb magnificence that pretty much took my breath away. Its narrative intelligence was at the level of a simulator…
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Charlie Brooker Doesn’t Like Hershey’s
From his column on the Kraft takeover of Cadbury’s in today’s Guardian: “As you may have noticed, the above suggestions work on the assumption that everything tastes nice when it’s swaddled in Dairy Milk chocolate. Which it does. A bloated, over-ripe corpse dredged from a polluted canal would taste nice if it was encased in…
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Oh, Joy
Just as I finish catching up on the second season of the French cops’n’justice drama Engrenages (UK title: Spiral, screened on BBC4 with a credit for co-production), I see from the Canal Plus website that a third season has just wrapped filming in Paris. Season Two was drug trafficking; in Season Three it’s a serial…
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Dracula
In a post titled What I Learned in 2009 I promised I’d tell of my experience adapting Bram Stoker’s classic novel for BBC Wales. Much as I’d like to say that I had a flood of emails urging me to go ahead, I haven’t. But you’re getting it anyway. (Nope, that’s not it in the…
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Nuggets
Early last year I completed a questionnaire circulated by the editors of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I was a member of the BSFA for a while, before I found that my changing tastes and inclinations meant that the British Fantasy Society was probably more for me; on moving over,…
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WTF?
No, don’t get excited. That isn’t the cover of a genuine Eleventh Hour mass-market edition. It’s the Chinese bootleg – at least, I’m assuming it’s a bootleg, unless fractured English and a Showtime logo on the back of the sleeve are the mark of an official release. A couple of days ago I got an…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
