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Dexter
ITV have begun running promos for Dexter, so pretty soon everyone in the UK will have a chance to see what all the fuss has been about. In the US, it’s already completed its second season. I referenced the show in a talk that I gave to the Forensic Science Society almost two years ago,…
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The Turn of the Tide
Looks like the high-definition format war is as good as over and that the next time I upgrade my Jason and the Argonauts, it’ll be to a Blu-Ray disc. I mean, I haven’t got a Blu-Ray player or anything. I haven’t even got a hi-def TV. But at some point I will. I was an…
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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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Out of the Unknown
The classic BBC anthology series. Only a few still exist, but when they first aired I watched them all. Best TVSF I’ve ever seen, because they treated the literary sources with the same fidelity and presumption of serious intent given to any classic adaptation. I’ve no doubt they’d appear creaky and flawed if I saw…
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Wallace and Kong
A post header which sounds like it has to refer to the most ambitious Aardman stop-motion film ever… A sequence in one of the Disc One extras on the 2005 movie boxed set shows that Peter Jackson owns a copy of the Edgar Wallace material. It’s used as the prop for the script that Jack…
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Lost, in Transition
You know where I came across the pilot episode of Lost? The one with the graphic plane crash and everything? It was part of the in-flight entertainment on a Virgin Atlantic service to the US. I mean, it didn’t bother me, but, you know… Apparently eight episodes of the new season were shot before the…
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BUGS
I had a note this morning from Dave Young, architect of my website, to let me know that Play.com are offering all four seasons of the mid-90s action thriller series BUGS at £7.99 a pop in their New Year Sale. (I mention the website business not because it’s relevant, but because it’s cheaper to hand…
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All Your Past Are Belong to eBay (2)
I undertook to say something about this, so I suppose I’d better… It’s the Adventures of Robin Hood annual, published by Adprint in 1961 and based on the Richard Greene TV series. It was a typical children’s annual of its era; a yearly one-off publication for the Christmas market, in large format with shiny board…
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The Avengers
Patrick Macnee tells the story of how, one day in Toronto, he bumped into Peter O’Toole who asked, as you do, what Macnee was up to these days. Oh, says Macnee, I’m doing The Avengers. “But Patrick!” wailed O’Toole. “You’re always doing The Avengers!” I loved that show. There had never been anything quite like…
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What’s Entertainment?
I have to admit that, for entirely positive reasons, I was hoping that NBC’s new zen cop show Life would tank and that its leading man, redheaded Brit Damian Lewis, would have to come home to the UK. Well, I call them positive reasons. But only if you’re prepared to view it in a selfish,…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
