My Books. Buy Them
Touchstone (3. All the Time in the World)
Baby, baby, baby… you’re out of time… Rachel, lost and alone... read more
Ghosts on the Moor
Three women spend Christmas in a remote cottage on Dartmoor to escape problems... read more
Lovers in Paris
Can your love live up to the most romantic city in the world? It’s Disneyland... read more
Touchstone (2. Family at War) – a time travel Blitz story
The unforgettable fire… Continuing the adventures of Rachel and Danny, a... read more
Meet me in Montmartre
New Year’s Eve. An English girl. A French boy. A blind date. A kiss... read more
The Striker’s Fear of the Open Goal
Get a life. Get the girl. Get to Wembley. Ewan Glumie was born on the day Man... read more
The Budapest Breakfast Club
This summer: Go to Budapest… Make a movie… Have an affair. Ten... read more
The Very Thought of You
What happens when you fall in love with a woman who died before you were born?... read more
Train Can’t Bring Me Home
Love. Literature… and Tom Waits. Lots of Tom Waits. 1993. The former... read more
The Girl with the Bomb Inside
School is shit, your hero killed himself and your girlfriend’s pregnant.... read more
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Tag Archives: TV drama
The shot heard around the world…
City’s Hollywood moment and the best short film you’ll see all year… I’ve hesitated to mention this until now, because, well, it’s nothing to do with writing, and it’s only about the little football team I’ve supported my whole life through thick and thin… mostly thin. But there was something about what happened last Sunday that has made it more than that. Something in the astounded reactions from all over the world this week that has made me think this …
Love like blood
I’ve always had a thing for vampire films. From the age of 11 I was allowed to stay up late and watch Hammer’s brilliant Dracula movies. I was obsessed for years with a comic adaptation of The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires. I even love Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and no one loves that. There’s something about vampire mythology that hits the spot in a way that werewolves, zombies and all those other members of the supernatural bestiary just …
It’s the little things that count…
I don’t normally write about TV series once I’ve already taken a look at them. But with the second season of Mad Men now airing on BBC4, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to immerse myself in it again, having only scratched the glossy surface of season one. And besides, this is Mad Men, quite possibly the greatest TV drama series of all time. It is easy to be seduced by the surface pleasures of Mad Men. It has so many …
What news of Little Nell?
It’s that time of year when new US TV dramas sprout up all over the UK channels and I have to concentrate on keeping my mouth shut because I’ve already seen the whole series that’s just starting. Yes, I’m a committed downloader of US dramas. I download episodes a day after they air in the States. Sometimes I let an entire season run and then download the lot in one go and I still get to see the entire series …
Burning down the house
When normal people like us get sacked, life offers nothing more scary than a frantic scouring of sits vacant ads. If it gets really desperate and humiliating, it might involve a trip to the Job Centre. Get sacked by the CIA, though, and you could end up homeless and penniless with nary a passport or credit card to your name. It’s called a Burn Notice. When super spy Michael Westen gets his burn notice, he’s dumped in Miami with no …
Better living through chemistry
Chemistry is the study of change. Electrons change their energy levels, Molecules change their bonds, elements combine and change into compounds. It is all of life: the constant, the cycle. Solution, dissolution, over and over and over. Growth, then decay, then transformation. It is fascinating. Really. So says Breaking Bad‘s Walter H White to a class full of teenage fucknuts on the morning of his fiftieth birthday. No one is listening. No one ever listens to Walter. If it wasn’t …
No sex, please, we’re British
She’s the scarily young theatre writer who created and wrote her own TV series by the age of 26. Lucy Prebble took a blog about the life of a London escort and turned it into a TV series for ITV2, the first original drama the channel had ever commissioned. The second season of Secret Diary of a Call Girl has just started, but I caught up with Lucy at the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival this summer to interview her for the …
So superbad it’s good…
I hate teenagers. I hate them as only someone rapidly metamorphosing into just the same old bores who used to moan at me when I was a teenager about how I was practically a part of the landed gentry because I got a record player for Christmas when they used to get an orange and apple and be grateful for it can. Teenagers today annoy me because they live in a fantasy land of entitlement, where you can call Social …
Thank you for smirking
I’ve been thinking a lot about Amelie recently. Not because I was using it to demonstrate some of the principles of Dramatica to my screenwriting class the other week, but because I’ve been watching Pushing Daisies, the Golden Globe-nominated TV comedy that is now showing here on ITV1. You see, Pushing Daisies doesn’t just look ‘somewhere between Amelie and a Tim Burton film’ (to quote its DOP); it is practically a remake of the French film. Okay, it’s not about …
Paradise reimagined
It shouldn’t work. It has no right to work. It’s only a ‘reimagining’ of a terminally uncool, horrendously camp 1980s sci-fi show. It has no god damn right to be the best, most relevant, most challenging, most thrilling hands down no holds barred sheer brilliant most awesome drama in TV history. But by the gods, Battlestar Galactica, somehow, is all of those things and more. And it’s finally back on our screens again for its fourth and final season. I don’t …
