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I’m a Media Whore, Get Me Into There
I was in London earlier this week, and while walking down Westbourne Grove I was collared by a young woman with a clipboard and a man with a lightweight video camera. They were collecting vox pops in the rain for I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (a Survivor-style reality show). She wanted to…
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Separated at Birth?
I was organising the pictures on my hard drive, and here’s a conjunction of images that got a smile out of me: Clearly there’s some common DNA in all my protagonists. On the left we’ve got Rufus Sewell as Eleventh Hour‘s Jacob Hood, on the right is Stephen Tompkinson as Jim Harper in my Oktober…
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You Know the Score
Lee Goldberg‘s comment on The Saint on TV has prompted me to plant another signpost to this underpriced gem, a 3-CD boxed set of Laurie Johnson tracks that includes over 70 minutes of Avengers cues including the full-length “mein liebe rose” track used to torment Mrs Peel in the episode The Joker. Although, I’d guess…
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The Saint on TV
Ian Dickerson has drawn my attention to this DVD, the perfect stocking-filler for the certain-kind-of-TV-geek of which I am one. Available as a web-only exclusive and currently on pre-order offer at £9.99, The Saint Steps in… to Television is an expanded documentary based on the interviews and extras gathered for Network’s boxed-set releases of The…
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Frequently Answered Questions
On Getting StartedI was lucky enough to start as a reader when horror was a subtle art, and just as lucky to start my career at the point where it turned into big business. So my early reading was people like HG Wells, Conan Doyle, Joseph Payne Brennan, and all those marvellous Pan Books of…
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Fnaar, fnaar
Been fixing some plumbing. Don’t ask.
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You Know the Face
Probably as J Jonah Jameson or Juno’s dad, or as Law and Order‘s Dr Emil Skoda, or any one of a zillion other shows or movies… In Gareth Maclean’s TV blog in The Guardian he asked the question “Who are TV’s most underrated actors?” and I immediately thought of J K Simmons. Simmons currently plays…
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A League of One’s Own
In a feature-length episode of Rosemary and Thyme titled The Memory of Water, I wrote a scene in which one of the characters – a fully-qualified anaesthetist, and like everyone else in a ‘tec show a potential suspect – explains over coffee in her kitchen a number of suspicious-looking phials that she keeps in her…
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Michael Crichton
A year or so after we moved into our current house we had a bookshelf collapse that was a consequence of a) the urge to display far too many cherished hardcovers on a screw-to-the-wall track system, and b) my total inability to put a secure screw into a plaster wall. One of the most cherished,…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
