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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,…
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Robin Romps
I’m still catching up, or I’d have pulled this post together before now… last Friday saw the broadcast of Andy Rattenbury’s Crusoe episode The Mutineers and this week it’s the show I’ve known all year as ‘hour five’, aka High Water by yer own James Moran. (The ‘hour five’ business, for a show that goes…
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KoB in the NYT
The Kingdom of Bones gets the following nod in the New York Times Book Review: Gallagher conjures a perfect demon to symbolise the industrial era of the turn of the 20th Century in England and America in a book that “shows the occult mystery in its best light”, Marilyn Stasio said in the Book Review.…
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John Brunner
I met British SF great John Brunner in his later years – liked him, but could understand his reputation for a certain spikiness and hauteur. He’d come up to Preston to address our local SF group and when the pub closed we all went back to Bryan Talbot’s house, where John was staying. I was…
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Autograph News
Issue 25 of Graham Groom’s Autograph News UK is now out, and here’s another snippet from my interview therein: I’ve got one last thing to say about autographs, and it’s a general point. Only ask if it means something. There are people out there who compulsively harvest signatures from people they neither know nor care…
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Strange Days Indeed
Well this has been one of the weirdest weeks ever. But I mean that in a good way. If you’ve been following the blog you’ll be aware that I have my name on a couple of shows airing on US network TV right now. I think I may have let it slip out once or…
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Eleventh Hour USA
The show debuts tonight on CBS in the slot right after CSI, and I’m holding my breath, crossing my fingers, and wishing ’em luck. I talked about the show concept, and influences, and the whole issue of adapted formats, in an interview with Tom Green for the Writers’ Guild newsletter a few weeks ago. Tom…
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Wickered
I came across my old autograph album when I was straightening the study a couple of weeks ago. Back when I was a child I used to study the end credits of my favourite shows and write to the stars at the addresses of the TV studios. It’s not a huge collection. Getting autographs was…
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I Want it All, and I Want it Now
In today’s Independent on Sunday Andrew Johnson writes: “The Large Hadron Collider, which took 20 years to build and cost £3.6bn, will not be able to unravel the mysteries of the universe for at least another two months, scientists announced yesterday.” His tongue was in his cheek when he wrote it. I sincerely hope.
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
