-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Back to the Murder Rooms
Is it Box Set or Boxed Set? One’s wrong but sounds right, the other’s right but… oh, never mind. The main thing is that the series of TV-feature length Murder Rooms mysteries produced by BBC Films is finally getting a widescreen DVD release in the UK. Created by David Pirie out of a two-hour special…
-
Chimera for Sale – Sold!
A note via the website from Stefan – who says he recalls being scared witless by Chimera, as well he might since he was nine years old at the time – sent me to check out this item at movie collectables and memorabilia dealer The Prop Store. Here’s the text, to save you from squinting:…
-
Revisiting Robinson
In a message via the contact page, Nancy wrote: My family and I have really enjoyed watching the Crusoe series but wish we knew how the story would have ended. Do you have any ideas how you would have reunited Robinson and Susannah? Well I do, and I did, although in series TV drama it’s…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
