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Mister Memory
Many years back I was interviewed by a reporter from the Manchester Evening News who asked me to sign a couple of Doctor Who books for his children. Later, when I was jotting down his contact details in my address book, I noted the names of the children as well. I met him again more…
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You’re Kidding Me
WTF – Torchwood Babies????
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New Gig
When people ask me whether I prefer working on novels or screenplays, I tend to give the same answer. Whichever I’m working on at any given time, I always yearn for the other. Novel writing is all brooding and solitude, which I kind of like. Screenwriting on a ‘go’ project is all deadlines and pressure…
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Yo Bafta
So, the Bafta results are out. Read ’em here. But don’t expect to see Sweeney Todd much represented, and don’t take that as an critique of its quality. Despite being (in my humble opinion) one of the top of this year’s crop, a dark masterpiece with a superbly sweet and sad turn from Helena Bonham…
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Sam’s Way
Back when I was with the Curtis Brown agency, one of my agents handled the Samuel Beckett estate and was regularly obliged to engage with theatre companies who wanted to revise or reinterpret the plays in some radical manner. At which point the producers usually put out a press release portraying her as an enemy…
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Where I’m At
I’m fortunate. I work in a London-centred business but I don’t have to live in London. I love the place, and I’ve lived there in the past; in Notting Hill Gate in the mid-seventies, when it was cheap, and for a while in Bayswater in the late 90s, when it wasn’t. I always think of…
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Disney
There’s a story of a Disney staff party which included a screening of an in-house short in which featured Mickey and Minnie getting raunchy. Walt Disney stood up afterwards, expressed appreciation, praised the quality of the work, and asked who was responsible for it. The two animators put their hands up and he fired them…
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The Steampunk PC
Alas, it’s a one-off. The screen is a converted Dell monitor and the keyboard’s a rebuilt IBM. I’ve no idea what the typing experience is like, but how Goth is that? The handiwork of Steampunk obsessive Jake von Slatt. See how it was done, and more projects like it, here. The Clockwork Steampunk Stratocaster is…
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Myths of the Movies
Much-namechecked mate Steve Laws tells me that as children, he and his brother once dismantled all their fireworks to create a movie-style gunpowder trail. They lit the end of it, and… phfft. Instead of the combustion burning its way steadily and dramatically down the trail, the entire line of powder went up in the same…
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Judgement Days
I don’t know who’s been handling the job in recent years, but back in the day I used to help out judging the Manchester Festival‘s amateur film competitions alongside Norman J Warren, director of Inseminoid and Satan’s Slave. The field ranged from pitch-perfect recreations of 50s American SF on 16mm by the Spence Brothers of…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
