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Winter Tales
Look out of the window. It’s lousy out there, right? Stay warm, stay safe, stay dry, and here’s something to take you away. Now online and live: five stories, read by their authors, for those inhospitable winter evenings. Winter Tales: Click Here
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No Time To Die: My Spoilerific Review
Me and Bond go way back, back to when I saw Dr No with my Dad in Monton’s Princes Cinema on its first run. Then From Russia, and on. We went to each new movie until I got a girlfriend to go with (something with a generational resonance that passed over my head at the…
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Kicking Off The Sixties
This posting from Network’s Twitter feed didn’t so much trigger a memory as confirm one. Somewhere in the back of my mind lurks the vivid image of a life-sized Supercar, complete with life-sized test pilot Mike Mercury, revealed at the centre of the revolve in the end credits of Sunday Night at the London…
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“How do I get my script read?”
“Any advice for getting a script read by some influential people?” A question asked of me recently that’s impossible to answer in just a few words. But here’s the digest version. My experience is that “influence” is mostly a public illusion of power, and it’s no subsitute for the actual ability to get stuff made,…
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Arts Aplenty. Or Rather, Not
“Get the scientists working on the tube technology immediately”—Tenacious D, City Hall I haven’t known many Politics graduates, but daily observation suggests a political class to whom science is a house servant, to be instructed or overruled as required, while the arts are a hobby like your cousin’s am dram or your widowed uncle’s watercolours.…
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Luther, Follower, Bryan and Me
A justified stir was caused last month by the announcement that production company Three River Studios has optioned the Luther Arkwright story cycle of my old friend Bryan Talbot for TV series development. From his roots in the underground Comix scene Bryan was a pioneer of the adult, epic graphic novel form, and the influence…
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Jeff Hayes 1953 – 2021
The entertainment industry’s a sociable business, but mostly you’re working in an ever-changing team that reconfigures with every project. It’s always great to see the good people again, and you can try to avoid the not-so-good people the next time around. But meeting someone professionally and quickly getting the sense that here’s a friend for…
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Doctor Who: From The Wilderness Years
I’ve been archiving some old files and I came across this piece, written as the preface to a charity anthology called Walking in Eternity in 2001. Doctor Who had been cancelled 12 years before, the Russell T Davis revival wasn’t even on the horizon, and… well, read on. I suppose now that we’re firmly into…
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My Second Ever TV Sale
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Plane Sailing
Before pandemic measures kicked in I was set to take a work-related trip to New Zealand. The prospect of a return to air travel has reminded me of flying Economy to the US for the first time in the 1970s. Midway over the Atlantic, a screen was pulled down at the front of the cabin.…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
