Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: dvd

  • Murder Rooms: The Ultimate Collection

    If you were planning to order this DVD set, hold off; there’s a problem with it. Instead of the promised widescreen remastering, the discs contain stretched and distorted ‘fullscreen’ images of very poor quality. Even at 4:3 the transfer is pretty awful. My set’s going back, pronto. I’ve emailed the distributor and I’ll pass on…

  • Back to the Murder Rooms

    Is it Box Set or Boxed Set? One’s wrong but sounds right, the other’s right but… oh, never mind. The main thing is that the series of TV-feature length Murder Rooms mysteries produced by BBC Films is finally getting a widescreen DVD release in the UK. Created by David Pirie out of a two-hour special…

  • Sergeant Cork

    After losing stock and technical assets in the Sony warehouse fire during the Enfield riots, it’s good to see Network DVD up and running again. And also happy to see the release of a second season of the Victorian CID detective drama Sergeant Cork, currently offered as a ‘web exclusive’ title. If you’re interested, don’t…

  • Chiller

    Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Stan for the news that Network DVD will release the complete Chiller anthology series on February 28th. Produced and in part directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, we kicked off the series with an adaptation of Peter James’ Prophecy and pulled in, as I recall, somewhere in excess of 11 million viewers. A…

  • Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy (2)

    UPDATE: Check out Andy Greenwood’s contribution to the comments section on the original post. Apparently the Laurel and Hardy collection exists in two forms, and Amazon withdrew the set from sale for a while due to a customer complaint about the goods as described. As far as I can see it’s a packaging issue and…

  • Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy

    I don’t often do this, but there’s an insane price for the complete Laurel and Hardy collection on Amazon right now; the boxed set originally retailed around two hundred quid. It includes foreign-language versions of some of the shorts made for export, with different supporting casts and, in some cases, extra routines and material. Plus,…

  • Super Duper 8

    I spent last Friday morning in the BBC’s number 4 grading suite at the Television Centre in London. For a while I’d been looking for some way of digitising the Super 8 that I shot in the late ’70s and ’80s, but there was always a problem. For all its reputation as a ‘bootlace gauge’,…

  • This Island Rod

    A recommendation – while googling for something else (I’ve forgotten what) I came across this film blog written by Roderick Heath, who describes himself somewhere as a film school dropout (I’ve forgotten where I saw that, too) and is based in Lithgow, New South Wales. It’s only been up for a couple of years but…

  • Bitch-slapped Bimbos and Silent Engineers (2)

    Monday’s Chimera screening had a satisfying turnout and the evening ran smoothly, with great atmosphere. There was an audience flyer which included the entirety of a long Time Out review from 1991 that I hadn’t seen before (Fliss Coombes and Naomi Phillipson, handling publicity for Zenith and Anglia respectively, had sent me all the cuttings…

  • Bitch-slapped Bimbos and Silent Engineers

    Read on and all will be explained. After a fashion. I promise. But first a reminder that this coming Monday (July 5th, 2010) they’re screening all four episodes of Chimera at the BFI Southbank, formerly the National Film Theatre, followed by a Q&A with director Lawrence Gordon Clark and me. The same day also sees…