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Post by pulphack on Jan 6, 2022 19:33:34 GMT
In one form or another this forum has been ticking over for - I think - seventeen years this year. Most people still here have been on it for almost that long. People come and go, and a hardcore come back when they have something to say. I think most of us are fairly ancient and actually have lives outside the internet. Just because you don't post doesn't mean you don't look in, it just means that you don't write unless you have anything to say. A large post count means nothing. Other forums operate according to the people who use them. This one carries on in its own way. If visitors want to sign up, or don't; or want to come back, or don't, then that's their choice and why it should bother anyone else I don't know. This one works according to its own rules, and that's all there is to it. The majority of posts on here are relevant to the subjects and the people who make them are involved. There are always some who don't post that way, and seem to like the sound of their own typing. Its' best to ignore them, really.*
But thanks for the patronising lecture from your extensive internet travels.
(*I am aware I am breaking my own rule here, by the way.)
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Post by pulphack on Jan 6, 2022 19:24:02 GMT
I wonder who Linda Pendleton left the rights to? Years back there was an issue with her and Gold Eagle as she wanted them to republish the early Executioners and the editorial team beleived this wouldn't work for the simple reason that the series as was then (about 15 years back) was very different from Don pendleton's original. Harpers had a company option the movie rights just before Gold Eagle was closed. I wonder how much input Linda Pendleton had, or if she was even included? The contractual snarl-up with her owning early rights and Harlequin/Harper owning later rights could be the thing that actually stalled her getting the series up and running again. IP rights are a nightmare at the best of times. As we have discussed before, Andy, it would be interesting to go back and do a retro/period Bolan, but the original conception of the character would be strange and ill-fitting to the modern world. There's space for Bolan to rise again if she's left the rights to someone who is proactive. Linda and Mike Newton going so close is sad, though. Steven Mertz is still around, I think (I hope).
PS - hello Andy, happy new year and how you doing? And happy new year to everyone (almost) on here.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 18, 2021 7:19:13 GMT
It always seems to me that Steptoe was Galton&Simpson channelling Pinter and Beckett through the lens of Hancock. Its got more in common with Endgame than The Rag Trade, after all.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 9, 2021 7:12:42 GMT
Coo! Gosh! It turns out that Molesworth in Punch had NOTHING TO DO with the books after all... Having just accepted the bits written in introductions for years, it was a bit of a surprise when, a couple of months ago, I came across an article about 'The Lost Diaries Of Nigel Molesworth' published last year. It appears that Geoffrey Willans created Molesworth for Punch in 1939 and wrote diaries of the goriller of 3B for three years before war, family, work, etc got him to put this on one side for over a decade. Then Collins had a kids mag edited by Kaye Webb (who met Searle when they were both working on the magazine Lilliput and married him before founding Armada for Collins) called The New Elizabethan, and she asked Willans to write some stuff. He went back to Molesworth, and the rest is history - Searle illustrates because of connection with wife and need to appease Max Parrish as killed off St Trins, etc...
Anyway, the original pieces were never reprinted apart from one or two in Punch anthologies at the time. Hence the confusion, I suppose. Anyway, a chap called Robert Kirkpatrick spent a decade tracking them all down getting rights sorted, and eventually publised them privately to rave reviews (which I missed). When Mrs PH tried to get me a birthday copy, there was not one to be found. But she is persistent, and Mr Kirkpatrick has a few available via ebay. Less the one that she nabbed for me. Thank you, dear... I will do the hoovering in a bit...
So, what was the early Nigel like? Pretty much the same, actually - he does not cast a philosophical eye widely, being much more focused on skool, life with gran in hols (tuough), and the war (skool buzzed by bombs, evakuated to skool so haf two headmasters - chiz - and even spend time at gurls skool where gurls wet and soppy about pash on games mistress who haf face like nanny goat). The skool is St Cypranes, the headmaster is not as tuough as Grimes and a running joke is his ability to predict the exact opposite of what actually happens, but Peason and Molesworth 2 are there (complete with ability to play Fairie Bells on piano), as is Fotherington-Tomas, who is called David (first name only mentioned once) and is the same but has not fully evolved 'hello trees, hello sky, etc' catchphrase. Given what I'd read about it, I wasn't expecting Nigel to be so far down the evolutionary chain (though he gets enough comments about his looks to suggest evolution stopped at goriller) but he came out almost fully formed, and its the world around him that was developed for the later books.
It's a tenner inc p&p, only 68pp of Nigel but an excellent 20+ pages of introduction and biographical detail (Willans' novels sound worth a search). I say ONLY 68pp but they are priceless and sit nicely alongside the St Custards years. I realise that only Dem, Lord P and Valdemar (if the latter two are still about) will be interested, but they would find this vital stuff to nab before it disappears again.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 9, 2021 6:44:33 GMT
All pretty grim by then, although they still had stalwart sit-com writers at work in Layton & Lynn, who'd worked on (and been in) the Doctor series. Wolfe & Chesney on reduced duties, and I see Stephen Lewis and Bob Grant tried to salvage the situation - but in truth, Verney was the starring name, and Michael Robbins was vital (as he was to most things he was in - a supporting actor who could carry a duff star vehicle for the floundering star). Some 'what did they do next?' names as well, of seemingly vanished writers. When you have that many on one short series and it's not a writers room but teams working in isolation (which is how Brit sit-com worked - most being short runs by one writer, very few being long run with several writers, as the Doctor series were), then it's not boding well...
Of course, this is talking about an almost forgotten and not very good at times sit-com from half a century ago, but for those of us who were kids then it was pretty big.
The extras look interesting though - the film of 'Best Pair Of Legs...' is pretty grim and gritty in a good way about the era. It would be interesting to see what the original TV version looked like. 'Don't Drink The Water' was a terrible waste of Lewis, Pat Coombs and Derek Griffiths in my view - however, my mate Leon's wife, who is Czech, discovered it on youtube the other year and absolutely loves it. Make of that what you will - certainly it;s made him wonder how she views the British -and by extension, him!
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Post by pulphack on Nov 16, 2021 15:03:04 GMT
I've only read one novel by LP Davies - The Psychogeist - which I picked up purely because it was published by Herbert Jenkins, a publisher I have a fondness for. Most of their fiction was library list stuff, apart from Wodehouse, particularly post-WW2. This means that the quality is variable, but more importantly in context here it generally meant that the writers were one or two book a year writers who might earn a little on the side, but did not have the output or sales figures to be full time or mainstream, and so break into the leagues where their reputation is perpetuated.
The Psychogesit was a good book, actually - a little dour in the telling, but a compelling tale of a mysterious stranger and an alien in a cave which turn out to be the psychic projections of a nearby villager in a near-coma in his bedroom, whose mind is revisiting a pulp comic he read as a boy and creating it in the flesh. As I recall (I don't have it now and it was a few years back)the alien stranger became a threat and only persihed when the man creating himself succumbed to his illness. It's told from the perspective of the creature, the dying man, and also from a third person perspective. It examines identity through this, and is very astute at keeping the truth (ie that the creature is a mental construct and that the dying man is actually linked to this) hidden - you spend most of the novel trying to work out how the strands of narrative will tie up.
I didn't get on with his style enough to want to actively go out and get other books by him, though if I ever stumbled across them as I did this, I would pick them up, but he was certainly an interesting writer who deserved more attention than he got. Being stuck with a library publisher ensured publication, but was a ghetto for many who could have reached a wider audience.
Well worth checking out.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 19, 2021 8:46:20 GMT
Three things...
'Fantipodean' is a stroke of offhand genius.
Regarding the whiole 'lost Dr Who' thing - would it be such a good thing if everything lost was rediscovered? Not just Who, but any series/film/book - is it just me, or is the imagining of what it might be much better than the real thing? Isn't the real thing sometimes a letdown after all that anticipation and imagining? My own example: Get Smart is a cracking series, but I didn't see it here until the 80's, whereas I read several of the books in the 70's when they turned up in a newsagent as cheap paperback ballast stock. As a result, the series was a let down as it was nothing as wild as the pictures in my head from the books. Sometimes its better left unseen/read. (I actually readjusted mentally to Get Smart and came to appreciate it eventually, mind you)
Mick Mercer - what a lovely bloke he was. What's he up to these days?
Steve - please have Julian & Sandy meet ST Joshi - that'll put him in his place.
That was four things...
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Post by pulphack on Sept 9, 2021 6:57:47 GMT
True, but whereas Dem is quite gnomic in utterance, the Koosh goes full-on raconteur.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 9, 2021 5:50:43 GMT
Backtracking a bit - BS Johnson, Steve - don;t knwo if you know too much about him but he was an avant-garde novelist whose ideas were interesting but execution was, for me, deadly dull. Jonathon Coe, middle brow Brit novelist whose speciality is taking old stuff and putting new twists on it (House Of Sleep was a Frank King meta-rip for the Guardian reading generations, and What A Carve Up! a simlar trope on the old Brit comedy horror movie - that sounds like I don't like him, whereas I do a lot) wrote an award winning biography of him (Like A Fiery Elephant, which was something a kid wrote about him when he was a teacher, though Coe reckons it was 'Fairy Elephant' but Johnson couldn't face that). Johnson committed suicide, and there is a lot of shady rumour that he had got himself caught up in occult practises. Nothing but dark mutterings and no real proof, but it sounds like rather than 'proper' occult circles (so to speak), old BS ('for bullshit, obviously,' according to my mate Tone who also read him) got himself embroiled in one of those Alex Sanders 'got it all from the News Of The World' circles where people took all the crap bits far too seriously. Coe got interested in Johnson after seeing that 'fat man on a beach' programme when he was a kid and wondering who this bloke was and why anyone would pay him to do that? Interestingly, he considers Johnson's football reports when he was a journo to be some of his best work.
Excuse the rambling but it's early and I stumbled back on this and remembered I was going to comment at the time but got sidetracked (don't we all...)
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Post by pulphack on Sept 9, 2021 5:37:01 GMT
I've never said it often enough (maybe once, actually) but I love it when the Koosh gets going on these. I suspect that his retellings are a lot more fun than some of the books or tv he's written about. They're superb. I can't wait to find out what happens next (though I suspect it involves more plot convolutions than there are grisly killings).
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Post by pulphack on Sept 9, 2021 5:27:04 GMT
I have some old VCR tapes, slightly soiled covers. I also have an old VCR machine, going cheap. Meet me round the back in half an hour. Cash only, squire, alright?
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Post by pulphack on Aug 7, 2021 8:32:10 GMT
Dame Ag and the sainted Moorcock in one? Well, MM might splutter in his tea about that, but it made me laugh. Splendid find, Steve. The idea that Elric might edge away from a red hot poker is also a nice touch, seeing as casual observers may forget that the point of him (so to speak) is that he is an unwilling hero...
Few more things like this may not go amiss... get weaving, Steve. (I'm far too lazy to do this, I admit)
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Post by pulphack on Jun 22, 2021 5:04:59 GMT
Valdemar! Good to see you back. Where have you been? (Not that I've been very evident either, perhaps to the relief of the board). I can only endorse that selection for a Fall starting point. It is a very representative comp, which I picked up years ago to save some battered viny getting more so. And 'Slates' is still my personal Fall fave, even though I think there are possibly better and harder Fall albums not long after. It's summer '81 for me, and so proves Noel Coward's dictum of the potency of cheap music, I suppose.
Steve, it's not even about 'liking' The Fall - there have been times when I've found even the records I liked unlistenable, but still you come back as it's the fact that the music and words are so unique - it's the dark charisma of the Prestwich bard MES (a description at which he would probably sneer into his pint)and the look into a unique mind that draw me back.
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Post by pulphack on May 25, 2021 15:32:51 GMT
Is Dem confusing him with Tony Stratton-Smith, founder of Charisma Records, escapee from the Munich disaster, and co-author of Pedro MacGregor's timeless 'Brazilian Magic: Is It The Answer?'... (depends on the question, of course)
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Post by pulphack on May 25, 2021 15:30:06 GMT
The Goddess that was Sue Lloyd was in a production with Wyngarde when he was nicked in Leicester. She recalled that the night the story appeared in the press Wyngarde made his entrance and had to stop and pause as he had a standing ovation. The people still loved Jason King, it was just the press and frightened producers.
Having said that, he did have a reputation for being a tad difficult (ah, the art of understatement)as his fame grew. I wonder if the problem was that he KNEW he was a better actor than most he worked with, and was frustrated at how long it took him to get to the top (JG Ballard was interred with him during WWII and in his memoir notes that even then Cyril - as he still was - had his glorious career mapped out in detail)? Certainly, when the chance came, the line between Peter Wyngarde and Jason King blurred more than a little. I wouldn't have minded reading 'Index Finger, Left Hand', mind...
Absurd as he may seem to some, and how terrible the shows can look now (Dept S doesn't, Jason King does), he was a massive influence on my life of career failure. Still love him for it, though...
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