Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 73

The Joke’s On Us: Where Does Comedy Go Now?

I wrote this a decade ago: ‘The English sense of humour really takes a lot of explaining. It’s a mixture of coarseness, camp, surreality, amateurishness, cruelty, subtlety, wordplay and dark dry wit. We don’t do puns – they’re loved by the French. We do like the strangeness of language (why else would we find the […]

Spitfire!

After reading yesterday’s comments, I quickly researched the PSB films recut from COI and GPO shorts. They seem to have started out with many musicians, who eventually boiled down to two, who became the band Public Service Broadcasting. They’re appear to be British, thoughtful, low-key backroom boys who have discovered a niche and give live […]

Weird & Wonderful London 7

I reshoot these images from bound collections, not from online versions, and in a great many of the old photography books I search there are unimaginably crowded scenes of protest or celebration. Of course we still do that now, but what impresses is the size of the gatherings then. Similar events today garner a fraction […]

A June Miscellany

No single subject today, just a quick round-up of the week. A lot of exhibitions, concerts and plays now roam the world in touring productions, so if you missed the Pink Floyd exhibition in London you can catch it in Madrid. The Kubrick exhibition, Tate Modern’s Franz West show (the Austrian artist destroyed artworks that anyone […]

War And Pax

Jan Morris’s prose changed my life, probably because I read her at just the right moment. This retired author’s most powerful work is still not easily available, although it exists in a magnificent Folio Society set and is now online. Let’s dispense with the most sensational aspect of her life first. A gender change, from […]

Weird & Wonderful London 6

  This grim-looking shot is not a corpse but something that used to be such a common sight around Hyde Park that a friend and I once made a short film about them – the escape artists of London would be put in sacks, hung from poles in chains and set fire to, then wriggle […]

The Rise Of Folk Horror

Lately a wealth of film footage has been restored and returned to cinemas, especially by the BFI, and in the light of British film’s ever-increasing financial instability it seems a good option for young filmmakers to mix existing footage into new forms. Terence Davies did it with ‘Of Time and the City’, about Liverpool, and […]

First Degree Burn

More books today. Gordon Burn was a Newcastle writer whose four postwar novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity as lived through the media spotlight. There was a fashion after 1950 for writing in a clean, spare style, partly because publishers were looking for shorter works that wouldn’t require so much paper in […]

Creating Arthur Bryant

Rosa Lysandrou thrashed the duster at Bryant. ‘Why must you always be like this? Why?’ ‘Oh, because the world is a dark and lonely place and it’s fun. Cast your mind back, Rosa. You remember fun. That night on the fairground waltzer in 1983 when the handsome young lad with the gypsy eyes rode the back […]

Magic Moments

Magic is having a bit of a moment. A new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection on London’s Euston Road is called ‘Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic’, and looks into the neural connections between the mind and the wand. Why do magic tricks, many of which hinge on a ludicrously simple premise, still fool people […]