Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 301

For Your Viewing Pleasure

Recently George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg have lodged very vocal complaints that blockbusters are ruining cinema, which is a bit rich coming from the duo who foisted them on us in the first place.

Film is a schizophrenic medium. It began as a stimulation to sensation, and only later (and briefly) developed a conscience. Despite a [...]

How ‘The Devil In Darkness’ Came About

My new radio play ‘The Devil In Darkness’, written for Hammer, has been posted and will soon come out as part of an audio collection. You can hear me talking about its genesis here. It also has a synopsis and a nice Staburst review here.

Re:View – ‘The Act Of Killing’

After a year of watching the most infantilising rubbish I have ever seen produced by a major nation, and feeling on the verge of abandoning Hollywood cinema for good, along comes a film so unique and incendiary that I watched it with my mouth literally hanging open. Its a film that requires you to stand [...]

Good And Bad London

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an architect in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an epitaph. Why else would Renzo Piano have raised the vast, ugly Shard? (A Mondrian of a building – attractive from a distance, disappointing close up). Londoners are very quick to decide whether the makeover [...]

Who Still Calls It The Post Office Tower?

A terrific recent article on The Great Wen (check out the site if you haven’t before) reminds me of the iconic status of the Post Office/GPO/Telecoms Tower (if only they had given the damned thing a name to start with).

In 1962, while still under construction, the BT Tower overtook St Paul’s Cathedralto become the tallest [...]

Is This Too Erudite For Modern Readers?

Let’s talk about word power. And I don’t mean that page in the Reader’s Digest encouraging you to improve it.

One of the things I find so disappointing about books like the megahit ‘Gone Girl’ is the flatness of the language, and ‘Gone Girl’ is certainly one of the better-written popular novels of the year. I [...]

Odes To London

It’s a rare pleasant morning in the City, so let’s have some London poetry, starting with this end of a poem by WH Auden on Londoners:

It belongs to them, to make it what they choose.

For democracy means faith in the ordinary man and woman,

in the decency of average human nature.

Here then in London [...]

Another Photograph From Sleazy, Prostitute-Riddled King’s Cross

They’re there somewhere, the junkies and the whores, all hiding in the reeds waiting to waylay innocent tourists looking for Lie-chester Square. Although all I can see from here is water, fish, birds, and Wimbledon – they’re projecting the matches on a big screen and have even astroturfed the nearest square, where they’re serving cocktails [...]

Re:View – ‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory’

Too much chocolate can make you sick, and there’s too much of everything going on over at the Drury Lane Theatre. This is actually two shows in one, the first half having almost nothing to do with the second, and reveals the weakness at the heart of Roald Dahl’s beloved book. The 1971 movie covered [...]

The London Cliches Live On

I live in a former red-light area. That’s it, there, on the left, in a photo taken by my neighbour a couple of days ago. Obviously it’s a close-up, so you can’t see all the drug addicts and prostitutes swarming all over the place.

This is all anyone appears to know about King’s Cross, which is [...]