-
All Your Past Are Belong to eBay (2)
I undertook to say something about this, so I suppose I’d better… It’s the Adventures of Robin Hood annual, published by Adprint in 1961 and based on the Richard Greene TV series. It was a typical children’s annual of its era; a yearly one-off publication for the Christmas market, in large format with shiny board…
-
Tony Tenser
I’m late catching up with the news, but British film producer and distributor Tony Tenser died on December 5th. I interviewed Tenser onstage twice at Manchester’s Festival of Fantastic Films, and considered it a privilege to be given the opportunity. Some obits that I’ve seen are characterising him as a producer of nudie exploitation pix…
-
For All Your Academic Needs
The Alabama Pacific University Online. Accredited by the NAAUCU. “Members of the NAAUCU are institutions whose standards do not meet the overly drastic and unreasonable demands of the recognized accreditation boards.” Affiliated institutions include The Sports University of Central Kansas (“e-mail disconnected while we figure out how to teach over the internet”) and The Boston…
-
Die Hard, in a Castle
When I was sixteen and ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s Hamlet for A Level English Lit, our English teacher Roy Bateman took the class to a screening of Grigori Kosintsev’s Russian-language film version of the play. It was only a scratchy 16mm print in a regional film theatre, but it blew me away. For me it became the…
-
All Your Past Are Belong to eBay
See this? It’s Yoshiya’s Action Planet Robot. A wind-up clockwork tintoy modelled (unofficially) on Forbidden Planet‘s Robby, it’s one of the iconic tin robots. There are plenty of them about, and recent reproductions can be had for just a handful of change. Back in 1999 someone discovered a horde of unsold warehouse stock and began…
-
Amazon Blog Interview
Jeff VanderMeer interviewed me about The Kingdom of Bones for the Amazon weblog. The Amazon daily blog is here – the post’s dated December 6 and sits between a memoir about Elizabeth Hardwick and an item about watching TV shows on your tie. Alternatively, you can skip straight to it by clicking here. Amazon.com: Besides…
-
Who Needs Them Golden Geese Anyway?
The Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan has written this astute analysis of the changing face of entertainment distribution, and the failure of the networks’ negotiators to grasp where their industry’s going. She writes, To put it bluntly, the corporations that control the entertainment industry need to wake up. In the digital age, content creators matter more…
-
Furious Fred, the Butcher’s Ted
Have you ever noticed how, whenever a drama features a small child’s drawing that has to play some part in carrying the story forward, you can tell that a child didn’t do it? (This one’s real. Jack the Ripper, drawn by my daughter, when she was aged about six. She’s twenty-one now. We used to…
-
The Avengers
Patrick Macnee tells the story of how, one day in Toronto, he bumped into Peter O’Toole who asked, as you do, what Macnee was up to these days. Oh, says Macnee, I’m doing The Avengers. “But Patrick!” wailed O’Toole. “You’re always doing The Avengers!” I loved that show. There had never been anything quite like…
-
WGA Strike: International Day of Solidarity
The strike called by The Writers Guild of America to secure a structure for future revenues from digital media continues. Today sees demonstrations of support in London, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Dublin, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth. My favourite story so far is of the homeless person on Hollywood Boulevard holding a handmade sign that read, Bums…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
