Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Author: Steve

  • “Physics is the New Black”

    Recent editions of the Wired blog and The Los Angeles Times carry similar articles about the rising popularity of hard science in TV drama, reflected in the launch of the Science and Entertainment Exchange. The Exchange is “a program of the National Academy of Sciences that provides entertainment industry professionals with access to top scientists…

  • Widget, I’ve got a Widget…

    You may notice that over in the right-hand column there’s an Eleventh Hour widget. Anyone can download it from the CBS site’s Eleventh Hour pages, and it delivers a daily factoid to your website or blog. A couple of days ago I learned from it that every time we sneeze, some of our braincells die.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Fnaar, fnaar

    Been fixing some plumbing. Don’t ask.

  • F & SF

    No, I’m not in it this month… haven’t written any short fiction for some time, as it happens, but way back when I started The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was my break-in point. I can’t tell you how proud I was. F & SF was – is – one of the classic genre…

  • 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…