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Television Q and A
How did you begin your career in television? I was writing for radio at the time. It was a science fiction piece for Radio 4’s Saturday Night Theatre and Martin Jenkins, my producer, sent the script over to the Doctor Who production office. So out of the blue came this call to go over and…
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Eleventh Hour USA
This just in from somewhere… DISPLAYING SIGNIFICANT WEEKLY GAINS, ELEVENTH HOUR DELIVERS STRONGEST PERFORMANCE TO-DATE Earning significant weekly increases among all 18-49 and 25-54 measures (ranging from +21% to 54%), as well as Households (+24%) and Total Viewers (+24%), ELEVENTH HOUR earned 1st place in its 10PM hour among those same demos. Delivering its largest…
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It Quacks Like a Duck
The BBC has announced Defying Gravity, a 13-part science fiction series to be co-produced with America’s Fox Network. “Set in the near future, Defying Gravity will star Sex and the City and Band of Brothers actor Ron Livingston and will follow eight astronauts from five countries on a mysterious journey through the solar system.“ Oh,…
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Truth in Escapism
Andy Greenwood’s comment on Crusoe and the Doctor, directing us onward to a fan’s mashup of Doctor Who images cut to the music from the Happy Days title sequence, made me think. In today’s Guardian, playwright Mark Ravenhill writes: “in the minds of many programme-makers, there now seems to be a crude binary option: you’re…
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Mister Home and Handy
Between revising an outline on Friday and the studio notes call to discuss it on Monday, I found myself with a Saturday on which to catch up with all the stuff I can normally use the writing to get out of. Made it through the day with just three wrong holes drilled and one smashed…
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Crusoe and The Doctor
I have no idea what brought this about. But it’s neatly done and kind of beguiling. Play it again. You know you want to.
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Right There, Right Now
In her craft blog Write Here, Write Now, Lucy Hay posts on the reluctance of British and American writers to tackle sex scenes in their screenplays. Which reminded me… I once wrote a draft of a script with a sex scene where I constructed it as I would any kind of action – laid out…
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And While We’re Talking About Sexy Science…
From today’s Independent: “A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.” The text in question was used as cover art for the journal of…
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“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…
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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.…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
