Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 252

Let’s Have Another Weird Song

There area lot of mad trunk songs that get written for auditions or shows that close out of town which appeal to the geek-collector in me. I would love to track down Ben Hecht’s bonkers play about Pancho Villa, which was turned into the flop show ‘We Take The Town’ (I don’t think it even […]

Beside The Seaside, Beside The Sea

Pity the poor British seaside town – unloved, unrespected, unvisited. While Europeans flock to Italian, French and Spanish equivalents (they even have great beaches in Holland and Poland) we get the remnants of once-attractive working class towns which have either had no investment or investment of the wrong kind from dubious town councils. Why no […]

How The Musicals Gene Helps Creativity

It’s a weird thing, the musicals gene, it feels unmanly, camp, cheesy – and while it can be truly horrible (I’m no fan of Andrew Lloyd-Webber) there’s something else behind it that no writer should dismiss. As a recent fringe production of the old warhorse ‘Carousel’ proved, there’s grit and truth buried in the best. […]

Yet More Bad Boris

This just in: ‘Boris Johnson’s office said that since he was elected, the number of Londoners living in areas exceeding legal limits had halved.’ It doesn’t say whether this is because he’s killed them or they’ve had to move to cleaner areas. The row is overnew figures just out pointing to Oxford Street as […]

Bad Boris Update

It seems my Boris story was ahead of the national press; new figures just out point to Oxford Street as the most polluted place on earth in the history of mankind, in terms of both hourly and annual mean. Yes, we have higher concentrations of nitrogen dioxide than anywhere else. If Boris had followed […]

Why London Needs A New Mayor Next Year

Most of us only encounter the effects of London’s mayors from a distance. Londoners used to irrationally hate Ken Livingstone without direct reason. I can think of two local positives for which he was responsible; a natural park he fought to establish in my neighbourhood and the improvement of the riverside, which had no wheelchair […]

Bryant & May Location No.3

This is St George’s Gardens in Bloomsbury, the little neighbourhood spot in ‘Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart’ where Romain Curtis sits with his girlfriend Shirone and tells her about the stars above them, before they witness the strange event that sets in motion the story’s murder plot. It has a surprisingly gruesome history, […]

Another Bryant & May Location

This is St George’s Gardens in Bloomsbury, the little neighbourhood spot in ‘Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart’ where Romain Curtis sits with his girlfriend Shirone and tells her about the stars above them, before they witness the strange event that sets in motion the story’s murder plot. It has a surprisingly gruesome history, […]

Where Have All The Horror Films Gone?

Where as the horror film gone? A few years ago I took part in a panel on the subject at the height of the ‘torture-porn’ cycle of movies. Someone else on the panel regarded films like Inside and Martyrs as transgressive representations of the future of horror, while I saw them as a step backwards […]

What Makes Appealing Writing?

A question: Do you want to try and get rich or do you want to be satisfied? Surprisingly, there are many writers who still believe that this is even a viable choice. Nobody who’s creative can ‘decide’ to get rich. Many writers who set out with supposedly killer hooks for their books quickly come a […]