Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: autobiography

  • Die Hard, in a Castle

    When I was sixteen and ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s Hamlet for A Level English Lit, our English teacher Roy Bateman took the class to a screening of Grigori Kosintsev’s Russian-language film version of the play. It was only a scratchy 16mm print in a regional film theatre, but it blew me away. For me it became the…

  • All Your Past Are Belong to eBay

    See this? It’s Yoshiya’s Action Planet Robot. A wind-up clockwork tintoy modelled (unofficially) on Forbidden Planet‘s Robby, it’s one of the iconic tin robots. There are plenty of them about, and recent reproductions can be had for just a handful of change. Back in 1999 someone discovered a horde of unsold warehouse stock and began…

  • Furious Fred, the Butcher’s Ted

    Have you ever noticed how, whenever a drama features a small child’s drawing that has to play some part in carrying the story forward, you can tell that a child didn’t do it? (This one’s real. Jack the Ripper, drawn by my daughter, when she was aged about six. She’s twenty-one now. We used to…

  • 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…

  • Teddy Alexander

    Most of what follows is from an afterword that I wrote to accompany a short story titled Modus Operandi; I got the story from a childhood memory, and writing it triggered a few more of them.My childhood home was a terraced house in Monton, just outside Manchester. Each street was a row of brick houses,…

  • Frodo and the Camel

    So my cousin Josh is working behind the bar of The Elusive Camel, when in walks Frodo. (I have family in Australia, on my dad’s side. To avoid complication we all refer to ourselves as cousins, regardless of generation or degree of actual relationship). Josh was over here for a few years, working and touring…

  • Crude, but Effective

    Every little community has its in-jokes, and each community has its bottom-of-the-pecking order geek who catches on late and then fails to realise when everyone else has moved on. In the world of Doctor Who – which has become a big world again, due to the success of the TV series’ revival – the fast-track…

  • Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn

    I can’t remember when I last walked into a bookshop and paid full price for a book. Well, I can, because it was this afternoon. Before that, I mean. This afternoon I was in London with a train journey ahead of me and nothing to read on it. The Tube strike was in full swing,…

  • Future Proof

    It’s not quite as bad as the days when companies were destroying assets to save themselves tape and space, but a certain short-termism still dogs the business. Richard Mitchell, who composes music for film and TV, told me, “A dubbing mixer recently explained that the UK TV industry has dug itself a hole which the…

  • Ian Richardson

    “An actor of astonishing power and magisterial presence on stage and screen; away from it, a humble, engaging, and truly likeable person. For any writer, it was an honour just to hear him speak one’s words.” Lines that I wrote for my website on hearing of the actor’s unexpected death earlier this year, and I…