Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 224

10 Reasons Why I Won’t Be Buying An Apple Watch

I love Apple products. They’ve changed the way I work, to the point where switching to someone’s PC is like going from a car to roller skates. I have an iPhone 6, a Macbook Air and a regular Apple home computer – my work tools – and they’re intuitive, fast and easy to use. So […]

Mental Movie Moments 2: Tutti-Frutti!

Used as a weapon to draw South American support for the war in Europe, Carmen Miranda had an odd career which saw being forced to her play on her image of a sexualised, then de-sexualised ‘easy’ Latin girl. When photographs surfaced of her infamous wardrobe malfunction (which theoretically should have further played into her sexy […]

The Weirdest Comic Book Ever Published

The most peculiar comic books available to kids were always the lines that caught the spirit of the times. In the conformist McCarthy-era 1950s, the desire for material wealth triumphed over anything too imaginative and strange. Typically popular were the adventures ofRichie Rich, the adventures of a grotesquely wealthy blond boy who was forever carting […]

How We See Ourselves

Can we call Martin Parr a National Treasure yet? The photographer has been turning a dispassionate eye on the English for many years now. I first remember watching his TV series ‘Signs of the Times’ (which I would love to see released on DVD – does anyone have it?) and watching couples discuss their homes […]

Why This Book Caused A Very English Outcry

First a bit of an explanation: Because I was born in 1953 I was a New Elizabethan, ie. born in the year of QEII’s coronation. My dates, therefore, match her reign, and I therefore have a fondness for Queen Elizabeth, despite only having ever seen her at the pictures. I mean she was at the […]

Who Was Oscar Deutsch?

The simple answer is that he entertained our nation. Deutsch (1893-1941) created a cinema circuit to rival the big two, Gaumont and ABC, and his chain is still with us today. This inconsequential-looking little man was the son of a Jewish Hungarian scrap metal merchant, and brought about an extraordinary revolution in British style, a […]

Books? You Can’t Give ‘Em Away

To celebrate World Book Day or National Book Day or whatever the hell it’s called, I signed a big box of books andtook to the streets with them to give them away to passing strangers. It turned out this was more difficult than I’d anticipated. People eyed me suspiciously and asked ‘What do I have […]

The Writer’s Diet

With apologies to my fellow scribes, I really don’t know many British writers who are fit. (I mean healthy, not fanciable.) We sit hunched over screens for a living. We consider time spent exercising to be time wasted. We’re trapped indoors for around six months of the year (at least). If we work at home, […]

‘Forensics’ @ The Wellcome Collection

I’ve yet to see a bad exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, and unlike most other shows in London (we now call them ‘shows’ I think, not temporary exhibitions) it’s free of charge. In this case the curators of ‘Forensics’, Lucy Shanahan and Shamita Sharmacharja, are to be congratulated. The gallery has been divided into a […]

The London Road That Never Existed

There are imaginary London addresses scattered throughout literature, but there’s also a real street in London that never actually existed, in the sense that one minute it wasn’t there, then it was, and then it was gone again. Any clues? It was called Broad Streete, and it appeared on January the 8th in 1683 in […]