Because this sort of thing is about all the TV I ever watch these days. And just because.

Back when I could write my age with a single digit (i.e. back in the seventies) the kids in my neighborhood came in two types. One was devoted to Sesame Street, while the other was an Electric Company aficionado. I was solidly in the latter camp, but as with my devotion to Beta videotapes, it [...]

As we’re halfway through Advent, I have something of a Yuletide puzzle for you. Christmas has an enormous cultural impact on society, one that’s far from limited to those who’ve been brought up in the Christian tradition, and I was thinking recently about the ways in which that cultural impact manifests itself. Music has always [...]

So, a few weeks ago, a guy called Alexx Leyva got in touch with me and told me he was making a 5-10 minute movie for his media class. He told me I was one of his favourite authors and he wondered if I had any short stories he might use, or if I had [...]

Having long been addicted to the idiot box, and now living in an age when some of the remotest, most obscure television shows can be tracked down in one way or another, during the last year I’ve been trying to find the best spy series around. This is not as easy as it sounds. In fact, it’s [...]

The BBC showed a documentary last night about the Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami. It wasn’t a great film and didn’t do much to convey why Murakami’s writing is so popular around the world. But it did tell me something I didn’t know about Murakami and that’s how reclusive he is. Perhaps reclusive is the wrong [...]

It’s a few weeks old, but I just came across this bit in the Guardian: Francesca Martin Wednesday June 4, 2008 John le Carré’s hit thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is to hit the big screen. The author, whose real name is David Cornwall, is at work with the scriptwriter Peter Morgan on a film [...]

I promise to get to some non-me posts soon, but this news just came to my in-box via Vince Keenan, and it seemed too good not to bring up. From Variety: George Clooney to play ‘Tourist’ Anthony Peckham hired to develop script. By Michael Fleming  Warner Bros. has set Anthony Peckham to adapt “The Tourist,” [...]

One thing you often hear published writers wish for is a film deal. It’s often talked of as a sort of career panacea, in much the same way that some unpublished writers think a publishing deal will give them everything they’ve dreamt of. By the same token, I think I’ve mentioned before that writers who [...]

Charleston Heston’s death at 85 has brought a flood of plaudits for his movie roles as Moses, Michelangelo, and Ben-Hur. There was something about Heston’s manner or his era that made him well-suited to play icons. His lesser known historical roles included Andrew Jackson (twice) in ‘The President’s Lady’ and ‘The Buccaneer’, and Rodrigo Diaz de [...]

The danger of writing lists is that you upset people with both what you include and what you don’t (as The Daily Telegraph discovered the other week with it’s 50 crime writers to read before you die). But I like the fact that lists also encourage us to think, and hopefully spur on a little [...]

A very unfortunate PS to the post on Brad Renfro below. I’m sure everyone will have heard about the death of Heath Ledger at the age of 28. Of course, Ledger’s most famous role to date was in Brokeback Mountain but you had a real sense that this was an actor whose most interesting work [...]

Brad Renfro is a name that probably doesn’t register with most movie-goers. Like many child stars before him, he never quite surpassed the heights of his debut, but he was a talented young actor who produced some fine work when he had the chance to do so. Among his many performances were parts in Ghost [...]

Last year at Harrogate I briefly met Harlan Coben. As ever with Harrogate, we had a couple of snatched conversations and that was it but he seemed like a really sound guy. On one of the nights there he was being taken off to Leeds to see the French film adaptation of Tell No One. [...]

…they do things differntly there – as LP Hartley says in the opening of The Go Between. And yet sometimes the past seems so close you could reach out and touch it. The gift I give you today is from Woodstock, Richie Havens singing the beautiful I Can’t Make it Anymore. Woodstock seems a poignant [...]