Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: television

  • I’m a Media Whore, Get Me Into There

    I was in London earlier this week, and while walking down Westbourne Grove I was collared by a young woman with a clipboard and a man with a lightweight video camera. They were collecting vox pops in the rain for I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (a Survivor-style reality show). She wanted to…

  • Separated at Birth?

    I was organising the pictures on my hard drive, and here’s a conjunction of images that got a smile out of me: Clearly there’s some common DNA in all my protagonists. On the left we’ve got Rufus Sewell as Eleventh Hour‘s Jacob Hood, on the right is Stephen Tompkinson as Jim Harper in my Oktober…

  • You Know the Score

    Lee Goldberg‘s comment on The Saint on TV has prompted me to plant another signpost to this underpriced gem, a 3-CD boxed set of Laurie Johnson tracks that includes over 70 minutes of Avengers cues including the full-length “mein liebe rose” track used to torment Mrs Peel in the episode The Joker. Although, I’d guess…

  • The Saint on TV

    Ian Dickerson has drawn my attention to this DVD, the perfect stocking-filler for the certain-kind-of-TV-geek of which I am one. Available as a web-only exclusive and currently on pre-order offer at £9.99, The Saint Steps in… to Television is an expanded documentary based on the interviews and extras gathered for Network’s boxed-set releases of The…

  • You Know the Face

    Probably as J Jonah Jameson or Juno’s dad, or as Law and Order‘s Dr Emil Skoda, or any one of a zillion other shows or movies… In Gareth Maclean’s TV blog in The Guardian he asked the question “Who are TV’s most underrated actors?” and I immediately thought of J K Simmons. Simmons currently plays…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…