Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 34

Reversing Censorship

When ‘The Book of Forgotten Authors’ was about to go to paperback, my young editor became worried about the lack of BAME authors featured. The book was mainly about postwar paperback writers, and there had been no populist BAME authors working in this field. The ones who wrote in the UK were university educated and […]

If In Doubt, Cut It Out: The New Entertainment Censorship 2

There can be no single defining rule to censorship. Mickey Rooney’s horrible impersonation of an Asian man in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ doesn’t get removed, probably because there’s no way of doing so without destroying the treasured film. Yet I remember the single shocking instance of the verb ‘fuck’ in ‘Cabaret’, which was changed to ‘screw’ and […]

If In Doubt, Cut It Out: The New Entertainment Censorship

  It started when I caught the opening of ‘Hairspray’ on Netflix and stayed tuned to watch John Waters’ cameo as a flasher on the streets of Baltimore. I remember Tracy Turnblad walking along a street filled with parodied sixties moments including a drunk in a bar (it’s early morning) and several pregnant women hilariously […]

When Things Go Bad

It’s an entertainment genre barely recognised, but once you look around you’ll see it everywhere; stories of an object that, once owned, brings bad luck and often death in its wake. The things of desire make for great morality tales. Stephen King has produced his fair share of cursed objects, especially in ‘Needful Things’, which […]

An Apology

I’d like to apologise for the extreme boringness of yesterday’s entry on BFI Film Guides. It was only one stop above The History of the Apostle Spoon. I had just returned from Kent and was overcome with fatigue, so I wrote about the nearest things to hand without thinking that they might proved staggeringly dull […]

The BFI Film Guides: A Guide

The British Film Institute shop continues to be the best destination I know of to find serious works on cinema. Its booklist includes the BFI Screen Guides, the International Screen Industries series and the prestigious BFI Film Classics, in which an academic conducts a study of a single film over 100+ pages. The BFI site lists […]

Baby Steps Toward Reality

Lockdown has left its mark on many of us. The famous Sunday Times verdict on JG Ballard was ‘He doesn’t care where he lives because he lives inside his head’. He invited his interviewers to conduct their sessions in the foyer of the Heathrow Hilton. A less conducive place for an intimate chat would be […]

London Did It First

Competition between cities is a funny thing. I remembered a terrible, pointless staged TV debate between two young men extolling the virtues of New York and London respectively. The New Yorker went into long intelligently reasoned argument, honed from years of being in debating societies, as to why New York was the ‘better’ city. The […]

How Not To Spend It

  This is the death-knell of the department store. (Above; the guest who did not tip) This is the year that turned into my own personal annus horribilis. But here’s something interesting: Our self-isolating future may bring an end to less fulfilling jobs. The service industry is the most obvious game changer. Over the last week […]

Going Home Is Just…Different: Part 2

A sort of posh bingo arcade Our Greenwich day out was not quite aimed at returning to my roots. Most of the houses I and my relatives knew have all been knocked down. Instead we head for the Old Royal Naval College, London’s former centre of maritime activity, because I have never seen its painted […]