Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 204

Books I Fight To Finish

Writers are not supposed to name the books they don’t like; it’s an unwritten law, as if by doing so we’ll somehow damage the trade. All writers have flaws and quirks; it’s what makes them individual and interesting, and is why instructional books like Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero’s Journey’ cannot be applied to the letter, […]

When Voters Get Extreme

When this website began back in 1953, one of my very first posts made fun of Sarah Palin. Oh how we laughed. Now, many years later, it’s time to wipe the smirk from our faces. But it’s an international disease; around the world, voters are choosing some very strange candidates. In the UK, the rise […]

A Surfeit Of Lampreys?

I blame Henry I. First our rivers were filled with these prehistoric river monsters, and then they weren’t after he died from eating a surfeit of the buggers. The lamprey is a really fugly snake-like creature that was around 200 million years before the dinosaurs. It’s the world’s oldest living vertebrate, and was once a […]

The Night It All Went A Bit Right

The Proms at the Royal Albert Hall has always been dominated by popular classical music, with intriguing sidebars of esoteric and eclectic pieces. Barring the ghastly flag-waving farrago of the Last Night, the selection is broadly sedate, pleasurable and not unlike listening to those albums of ‘British Light Classical’. This year was no different to […]

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

In 1996, when I still had my film company, we worked on a disastrous new version of ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’. HG Wells never makes for easy adaptation, partly because, like John Wyndham, we remember his books wrongly. In Wyndham’s ‘The Kraken Wakes’ and also in ‘The War of the Worlds’ events unfold in […]

Summer Never Arrived So Let’s Do Winter

It always rains at London’s Notting Hill Carnival, and it did again this week. Why we think August would be anything but wet and horrible is a mystery. Enough of pretending we’re not freezing in shorts and T-shirts – after yet another miserable, cold, wet, non-existent ‘summer’ here I am now revising my options. This […]

Witty Songs: A Brief Guide (Part 2)

We came a long way from the Victorian music hall songs and monologues of stars like Stanley Holloway and Joyce Grenfell. After, we had Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight?’, Max Bygraves singing ‘You’re A Pink Toothbrush, I’m A Blue Toothbrush’, comedy songs like ‘When Father Papered The […]

Witty Songs: A Brief Guide (Part 1)

Like the Fado is to Portugal and the tango to Argentina, the witty song is to Britain. We were always better at words, especially if they weren’t about love, which simply embarrassed us. We have Gilbert & Sullivan to blame for this, with their gymnastic lyrics. Here the Major-General lists his abilities, being a military […]

Things To Make & Do

Never begin a sentence ‘When I was young…’ and never continue with; ‘we made our own amusement.’ However, when I was young we made our own amusement, from which something fell out of the Jamboree Bag of my mind; giveaways in British comics, one of which was a piece of cardboard folded from corner to […]

I Don’t Know How To Write

I’m not a huge believer in How To Write guides. I’ve tried to read several books on writing novels, but the only one I enjoyed was Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’, because it’s more of a pulpy, bouncy memoir about being a popular writer than a proscriptive list of dry rules for story structure academics. In […]