Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 37

Thinking About The PCU Characters: Colin Bimsley

The old joke about mothers and fathers being unable to help their children with examination paper revisions is true. The page above comes from a current exam paper for the ages 10 – 11. Try to work out what subject it’s for. I failed. Meanwhile, I think back to taking my 11+. The examination featured […]

Back To The Front

Yesterday I woke up unable to breathe. The doctor thought I’d caught COVID so I ended up in A&E. After I tested negative for the virus it was decided to look for something else. As the day wore on I underwent a battery of tests. Canulas were fitted, much blood was taken and a CT scan […]

I Don’t Make This Stuff Up, You Know

Comedic writing should be taken seriously. It’s harder to pull off than you’d think. You need to have an image of the comedic element that you’re encouraging readers to ‘see’, and you have to divide out the serious elements of a book from the comic ones and keep them separate. Good comedy often comes from the […]

A Right Royal Shopping Spree

HRH likes a tipple, and her choice of poison is of course her own mother’s ruin, gin. So it makes perfect sense that the Queen should start selling Buckingham Palace gin, described thusly on the label; ‘Lemon, verbena, hawthorn berries and mulberry leaves are among the 12 botanicals hand-picked for the gin in the Gardens […]

London One Decade Later

A decade ago, in 2010, I was asked by the Daily Telegraph to answer a few questions about London. Here’s what I told them. I’ve annotated those answers for the present day. I thought it would be interesting to compare! Why London? A city is made by its people. My friends and family are all […]

Bryant & May Are Back in 13 Days (New Citrus Flavour)

  In the history of the Bryant & May books one thing stands out; the author has always known how to throw a party. In fact, there has never been a new Bryant & May without a launch bash of some kind. My editor Simon Taylor makes a delightfully pertinent and mercifully short speech, and […]

What Will Happen Next?

Who knew that cutting hair was so easy? What will happen next? Plague of frogs. Death of the first born. A third Dr Phibes film. You name it, lockdown’s ending, we’re off-road and anything can happen now. Beach chairs are selling out in Siberia. The virus-denying Brazilian president is sick, and the rest of the […]

Film Review: ‘Bacurau’

What a great couple of years it’s been for Latin cinema. It feels as if South American, Hispanic and Chicano films have taken a forgotten page from the Hollywood playbook and reapplied it to cinema. Forgetting fancy effects, stars and hype, they’ve put story back front and central, so much so that the sinister political […]

London Is People: When Will They Return?

‘I’ve got my eye on you,’ says landlady Irene Handl suspiciously. ‘You’re always going out.’ ‘I was out and came in again, I don’t call that always going in and out,’ replies Hancock indignantly. There has always been a Traditional British suspicion that people who go out a lot are a bit ‘fast’ and not […]

Sunday In The Pub With…

It appears Britain survived the easing of the Lockdown over the weekend without drunken gangs terrorising the nation. Sky News and the Daily Mail decided to run with their pre-prepared headlines of ‘brawls in Soho’ in spite of the fact that there were none and police said people generally behaved themselves. Sunday, then, a time […]