Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 193

The Play Wot We Wrote

I don’t know what it is with me and trains. When I was a little kid I saw ‘Dr Terror’s House of Horrors’ (which should have been called ‘Dr Terror’s Train of Horrors’ – an indication of what a sloppy piece of what it was) and was fascinated by the ghost train at the end […]

What A Bullfight Sounds Like

In the back-alleys of my overstuffed iTunes files I recently found all my old voice memos, from a rainstorm in Sri Lanka to kodo drummers in Japan, and this, matador Padilla’s return to the bullring after being gored through the eyeball, complete with cheers and a brass band. If you audio-scripted it you’d be accused […]

The Place Where There’s Too Much Christmas

Every country has one; in the UK apparently a horrible-looking Christmas shopping outlet called Bicester Village attracts Chinese tourists to its high-end shops, and I sure that every American state has at least one place that overdoses on yuletide shopping opportunities, but when I chose Strasbourg in north-eastern France for this year’s Christmas market weekend, […]

Putting The Walls Back Up

At the end of the film ‘The Big Short’, the narrator explains what actually happens after a credit crisis; the banks make more money and the blame passes onto the poor and immigrants. With Donald Trump now exposing his true identity as a lunatic fascist and one in three French votes falling to the equally […]

When Brilliant Filmmakers Play Safe

Looking back from the eighties to the present day, one trend is obvious – the great directors who emerged then have all have all got fat and rich – and dull. Robert Zemeckis, whose every film I loved right from Used Cars to Death Becomes Her and the Back To The Future trilogy has made […]

The Greatest British Novel – A Travesty

So, the BBC commissioned 81 respected book critics (odd number and no details of the selection but never mind) from around the world to help decide the greatest British novel of all time – I know, the whole thing is spurious to say the least, but it’s a fun talking point – and each one […]

What He Did In The War (Interactively)

Like most Londoners I never get around to doing the things tourists do. I had mentally ticked off the things I never wanted to do again, like Madame Tussauds and the ‘Blitz Experience’, both overpriced and awful, the former now for celeb-struck gawkers and the latter an ‘experience’ (mercifully now shut) in which you found […]

Falling Back In Love With London Part Three

November was the UK’s dullest month since 1962, which is why everyone looked so depressed on the tube every day. Yesterday morning dawned in such a blaze of heat and light – yes, heat; the confused trees in my street are blossoming – that I decided to do some hands-on research, and headed to The […]

Minding Our Language

Me, I’m the master of the split infinitive, can’t spell ‘receive’ and still sometimes get confused about when to put full stops inside brackets, but other than that, my editor doesn’t have to waste much biro ink on me. Or should that be Biro ink? However, while I’m as exercised as anyone by signs like […]

The Writers’ Block

There are certain buildings that attract people in the creative community. At the start of WWII in Brooklyn, New York, there was one such house that was filled with the flatmates from hell. What happened when WH Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Paul & Jane Bowles and Gypsy Rose Lee all moved in together? The […]