Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 253

Did You See What I Saw?

Music venues are a blessing and a curse – they give you the chance to see dream-teams of bands and performers you’d never be able to see anywhere else, but they can also be cattle-runs where you see virtually nothing from expensive terrible seats. From a strictly viewing point of view, the worst experiences […]

London: A Load Of Rubbish

I live on a rubbish dump. My neighbourhood has been a lot of things in its 2,000-year history, from a battleground to a sacrificial site to a spa with pleasure gardens to a rubbish heap. The caption for this painting reads: ‘View of the Great Dustheap, Kings’s Cross, Battle Bridge, 1837, from the Maiden […]

Re:View – ‘Monty Python: One Down, Five To Go’

The first-night audience at London’s vast 02 last night clearly knew what to expect; the audience was full of Spanish inquisitors and Gumbys. And that, pretty much, was what they got – a greatest hits package that felt like a rather tired reprise of the Hollywood Bowl show back in the 1980s. Python is the […]

What Made This The Most Successful Show Of All Time?

Writers are fascinated by good stories, and are forever trying to analyse their structure to understand why lightning strikes, but perhaps the answer is simpler than we realise. I resisted watching ‘Breaking Bad’ for a long time because the subject matter didn’t seem that appealing (terminal cancer patient starts drug dealing), and had to be […]

Does The Internet Shorten Attention Spans?

Sorry, what was the question again? Oh, the internet. Hang on, let me Google it. Last week there were several hand-wringing articles by Will Self and others about the digital age creating shorter attention spends that are damaging our ability to concentrate. The authors worried that immense literary novels – and there are such things, […]

The Rules Of Crime

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was a Catholic priest known for his theological scholarship. He single-handedly re-translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into English, and often wrote on religious themes. But he was also an editor, literary critic and humourist who wrote six decent mystery novels and three volumes of short stories, starting in the late 1920s. According […]

Writing Out Stereotypes

The other day my Italian barista in London made an old joke about the lack of Indian football teams (‘If someone tells them to take a corner they open a shop on it’) and as I walked away I thought, ‘That was a bit dodgy’. Although you could argue that it was in praise of […]

Another Bryant & May Location

All detectives seem to have a place where they can go and think. Waterloo Bridge features in most Bryant & May books as the place where resolutions are made, plans are arranged and cases are closed. Why there? Because, despite not being a particularly attractive destination in itself, it offers the best views of the […]

London Attitude: Why So Laid Back?

About four years ago, a British TV channel held one of those pointless debates to decide something unquantifiable. In this case it was; ‘Which is the cooler city, New York or London?’ Fighting in the NYC corner was a born New Yorker, a very smartly turned-out bright-eyed Time Out journalist with neatly side parted hair. […]

Re:View – ‘Room 237′

When you work on a film in any post-production capacity, you have to be prepared for the fact that the film will be ruined for you forever. The endless repetition of footage, sound and music cues deconstructs the scenes that touched your heart until they become little more than pixel rainbows. It’s worse when the […]