Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 197

Tony Hancock’s 90th Birthday

As comedian Tony Hancock would have now been 90, his writers Galton & Simpson (they deserve single name status) unveiled a blue plaque for him in Kensington and the Daily Telegraph ran 20 great quotes including; ‘Does the name Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?’ and ‘Have I been sought […]

The Travel Bug

Recently a friend went to Machu-Picu and came back less impressed than he thought he would be. Not with the place itself, but with the hordes of tourists, selfies and Instagram-opportunities preprogrammed into every step of his trip. Lately I’ve been thinking about where I would really like to go, and Machu-Pichu is not as […]

Who Needs Film Critics Anymore?

With winter nights drawing in I’d hoped we would get a bumper crop of horror films – my guilty pleasure – and after the beautiful-looking but cartoonish ‘Crimson Peak’ I’d hoped for something original at the low-budget end. Instead I watched ‘We Are Still Here’, an astoundingly bad, illogically plotted haunted house movie starring former […]

Films Which Have Really Peculiar Moments In Them No.3

Here’s one where the peculiar moment comes in the opening moment of the film. ‘Thank God It’s Friday’ is a now forgotten movie set in a disco-era nightclub that’s stuffed to the gills with soon-to-be big stars including a then-unknown Donna Summer and Jeff Goldblum! But even as the film starts, the disco beat has […]

The End Of A British Tradition?

Guy Fawkes was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a terrorist basically, one of a group of plotters who decided to blow up the government of King James I & VI, not because they were against government oppression; they wanted to be in charge. […]

Burning & Glorious Today!

So, what happened was this. Wrote a Bryant & May novel called ‘Full Dark House’. Had it rejected by Little, Brown (Little, Brown bought z-celeb biography for a mint instead, lost shirt) Took book to Transworld. They liked it, commissioned two. Those broke even, so they commissioned another. (Repeat another eight times) Published ‘The Burning […]

The Importance Of Social Media For Writers

Once writers were assigned PRs who booked them on radio, took them around the country, sat them in bookshop windows and handled the printing of ads and in-store posters. It was expensive for publishers and not always successful. If writers were known in other areas of the media the public were more receptive, but most […]

Bond Is Back (But He Never Went Away)

There are certain constancies to British life, things which have been set in place all my life; the Queen, London, the Beatles and Bond being among them. Every generation is seeing changes of course but London has a fundamentally stable culture. The first 007 book was published when I was 5 years old, and I’m […]

The Shock Of The Familiar

In Dominic Sandbrook’s ‘The Great British Dream Factory’ (now also a TV series) the author points out that far from bursting upon the music scene and shocking the world, the Beatles were as carefully planned as any boyband, with one member fired, an orchestrated assault on public wallets and a manager who knew how to […]

Childhood’s Nightmare Creatures

I’ve posted a little before about strange childhood books – culled from my weekly column in the Independent, ‘Invisible Ink’, which just hit its 300th column today and will appear as its own book at the end of next year – but here’s a further exploration of childhood creepies. I tried searching for a book […]