Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 496

Is London's Crime Museum About To Open?

Scotland Yard's Black Museum, which has been renamed the Crime Museum after complaints from officers in areas with large ethnic minority populations, has been one of the world's most macabre and inaccessible museums for well over a century, acquiring infamy among hardcore Londonphiles. It is, by all accounts, a profoundly depressing experience.

The museum is [...:]

Re:View – 'Green Zone'

Working Title and Universal's 'Green Zone', from director Paul Greengrass, tanked at the US boxoffice, but probably not for the reasons that first seem likely. It's an intelligent blockbuster in which a rather saintly Matt Damon, all quick thinking and barking commands, starts to question the Bush admin intel that repeatedly fails to turns up [...:]

Hollywood In Toilet: Official

If you thought nothing in the entire world was more nails-on-a-blackboard, squeaky-teeth, paper-cut annoying than Fred the internet 'sensation' (or as Gawker puts it, if The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came with a free iPhone 4, Fred would still be more popular), he's now a Hollywood movie, although in this trailer they seem to [...:]

The Sexiness Of Books

The Kindle is plastered all over the pages of the Amazon UK website in what is increasingly looking like desperation. I like the idea of an ebook reader, but then there's this picture, which I took on the beach yesterday. And it's weirdly sexy. Book sexy. The casual sifting of sand from the pages, the [...:]

Re:View – 'Consenting Adults'

This standalone BBC4 drama (we used to cal them plays) continues the Beeb's fascination with recent bits of social history – but how do you make the story of a government report interesting? Lord Wolfenden's report into prostitution and homosexuality, commissioned in 1953 and published four years later, is not the stuff of high drama [...:]

Keeping It Real

As opposed to fake, that is – for it seems, on holiday at least, virtually everything is fake. Piracy is now so endemic in certain parts of the world that separating real from fake requires a clever eye. In Cambodia, I noticed that all of the bookshops sold pirated books. You could tell these from [...:]

How The World Sees The British

I only have the vaguest notion of who Benny Hill is – he's the professor who likes big women in The Italian Job. I certainly never saw his show – I've never watched TV that much, and virtually stopped altogether about 20 years ago – but apparently to many Americans he still represents Britain, although [...:]

When Words Go Bad

Bristol Palin has refudiated her fiance again, after just 20 days.

Remember 'Quadrilogy', the word Hollywood came up with for the 'Alien' boxset when they couldn't think of 'quartet'? I think Sarah Palin's 'refudiate' deserves to be enshrined in our lexicon too, especially as her family has a reason to use it since 'Bristol' (not a [...:]

One Of The Year's More Surreal Headlines

'Supermodel Naomi Campbell To Give Testimony At War Crimes Trial'

If you remember such things, the Streatham-born supermodel is alleged to have received a "blood diamond" from the former Liberian president Charles Taylor while staying at Nelson Mandela's home in September 1997. Taylor, the first former African leader to be tried in an international war crimes [...:]

Off The Rails On The Radar

In a rare moment of self-promotion (you know I'm a bit rubbish at this) I can be heard with the excellent Karin Slaughter and others on BBC's Front Row (might have helped if I'd told you when it was actually broadcast) here. And 'Bryant & May Off The Rails' got a starred review in Publishers [...:]