Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 190

London Gets An Old Pub Back

While the trend of emptying out fine old pubs and turning them into flats isn’t slowing, there’s been a lot of talk lately about saving some London pubs by having them listed as assets to the community. Sadly, this hasn’t helped boozers at the city’s heart much because they don’t serve ‘communities’ anymore. But every […]

Word On The Street

The Londonist points me toward a new map which places works of fiction in their correct city locations, and I’m a bit on the thrilled side to say I’ve made the cut (although I haven’t seen the finished thing yet). The Map of Fictional London takes you from The Wombles to Dracula, and provides a […]

Derren Brown – ‘Miracle’ Man

No Spoilers ‘Tell no-one about the show,’ says mentalist Derren Brown in his seventh outing on the stage, ‘Miracle’, which is a bit disingenuous considering he’s all over our TV screens like a cheap suit. Britain’s most beloved showman can always be relied upon to give audiences thrills and a few shivers even if this […]

We Pay To Use The Roads – Should We Pay To See Art?

Remember the notorious V&A ad that said ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’? Last week I ran a piece on my dispiriting trip to the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, now little more than a children’s playground (including a fairground ‘simulator’ ride) with a few nice bits attached, and apparently – I can’t […]

Has The Horror Film Gone For Good?

The genres of most future films were firmly established when film was in its infancy.Of those, SF eventually came to the fore (albeit in a watered down version of its literary antecedents), the musical and the western both went away, crime moved to television and comedy was reduced to pubescent smut, an Apatow/Stiller format set […]

How We See Ourselves

The story so far; freelance photographer Joel Goodman had a picture published on the Manchester Evening News website of New Year’s Eve revelries. It got picked up virally and flashed around the globe after someone spotted that it seemed rather like an old master, conforming to the Fibonacci Spiral or ‘Golden Ratio’, a pattern occurring […]

Farewell To A Hero

We can be heroes just for one day? He was that for much, much longer – someone who was always there, and he’s died too young. The spot in Heddon Street where he was photographed for this album sleeve now has a plaque – and here’s a remix from the title track of a lesser-known […]

The First Schoolboy Hero

The heroic English schoolboy is an archetype that has survived for two centuries, finding its most recent incarnation in the form of Harry Potter, a perfectly adequate avatar for a generation of middle-class children who wanted stories set in a rigorously ordered society of loyalties and hierarchies. But the story of the English schoolboy goes […]

Why Don’t Voters Choose The Best?

As a long-term member of the British Film Academy I applaud its rigorous voting system, which I think works fairly for everyone, but it doesn’t mean that I always agree with the members’ choice. I’m staggered that the distinctly average ‘Bridge of Spies’ comes out top of this year’s nominations, just as I’m shocked by […]

History’s Greatest Witness Gets Interactive

There’s that dread word again – interactive – and this time its victim is poor old Samuel Pepys. There’s a tendency to think of London’s great diarist as a dull man living in interesting times, but this is not actually the case. It’s the description of all those dinners that have left this impression, and […]