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On Adaptation
Adapting is not a matter of reformatting. Adaptation is re-imagination. When you’re reading prose, the incidents may run as vividly in your head as when you’re watching a movie, but don’t let that mislead you into thinking that there can’t be that much difference between them. Back in 1997, Pumpkin Books published the full text…
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Horrocks, Capaldi, and the Rain That Never Fell
The first time that he saw her was across the parking lot of a motorway service area. It was about a quarter to midnight, and it had been raining. He could see that she was tired and cold and that she’d probably been on her feet for some time. She didn’t look much more than…
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Granada Days
Kill transmission! Lime Grove? Fill in, will you. I’ll be back as soon as possible. Tell Presentation… My first steady TV job in 1975—my only steady job, ever—was with Granada Television’s Presentation Department. Prior to that I’d put in a few weeks as a researcher for John Willis in Yorkshire TV Documentaries, but I took…
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Abroad Thoughts from Home
This is probably the most niche blog post ever, but I wish I’d had access to something like it when the need first arose. It’s the Idiots’ Guide for a British writer joining the staff of a US TV show. How you land the gig is up to you. This is just about the admin.…
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The Entitlement Thing
The magazine Doctor Who Monthly runs a readers’ poll every season. This year, one reader couldn’t even wait until the end of the run before sharing. He gave every story the lowest possible mark (‘Awful’), including those he hadn’t seen. He hated every villain that wasn’t a Dalek, and called for Matt Smith to be…
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The Silence of the Witness
A shout-out to David Richards and the crew who today begin shooting on my two-part Silent Witness story for series 16. It’ll air next year. I was told, “Don’t be afraid to make it your own,” and I’ve taken them at their word. It can be tricky, making a contribution to an established and long-running…
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Dollhouse Thoughts
Yeah, we’re nothing if not timely here. For me, Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse was one of those disappointments that take a few episodes to fully sink in, as my Firefly buzz faded and it became all too clear that this broken show wasn’t going to get any better. But in the DVD release (which I borrowed…
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Savage Season Interview
From an interview just posted on the Savage Season Books website: “I’ve never consciously scheduled my career to the extent that I could say, Oh, yeah, I put this aside and focused on that. If you do this for a living then you’re relentlessly pushing to do all you can all the time in whatever…
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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…
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Back to the Murder Rooms (2)
My daughter Ellen, known to the Twitterverse as @audreydeuxpink, had a small speaking part in my Murder Rooms episode and has been blogging about her experience of the shoot. Check out the middle picture in the post below – that’s her in the doorway of the travelling-show caravan, between Warwick Davies and Charles Edwards. You…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
