And so the actor said to the drummer....

I missed this play when it was broadcast by Radio 4th on 8th Dec 2011, but I subscribe to the BBC's Play of the Week Podcast and thankfully this play was one of their selections and can still be found in the iTunes store - podcats, play of the week, burning both ends. The play tells of the unlikely friendship between actor Oliver Reed and The Who's drummer, Keith Moon. Both men were known for the excessive drinking and bizarre antic.


This play is both a humorous and bitter sweet examination of those days - it's also a study of friendship and was bloody brilliant. Written by Matthew Broughton, and directed by Sam Hoyle. the same team have previously   collaborated  on several radio plays, most recently, Vincent Price and The Horror of The English Blood Beast - a peek behind the scenes of the British cult horror classic, WitchFinder General.

This play is similar to Bloodbeast in that it is a study of bored celebrities - men who have seemingly attained everything but are finding the world in which they live in to be shallow. The play is narrated by Oliver Reed who introduces us to the play by telling us that he is dead which then leads on to a dramatisation of events between Reed and Moon, specifically the mayhem they caused during the filming of Ken Russel's Tommy.

Burning Both Ends, stars Sean Pertwee as Oliver Reed, and Arthur Darvill as Keith Moon.

In the mid-1970s, Oliver was an international movie star, and Keith was a rock n'roll legend, the drummer for rock band, The Who. Both were famous for their partying and boozing, as well as their undeniable talents. Mercurial and unpredictable, both men were at the top of their game - but the top can be a very lonely place.
Then they met, on the film set of The Who's epic rock opera, Tommy. What followed was a revelation - in each other they found a true kindred spirit, their own shadow image.


This is a story of madness and mayhem, antics and adventures, but also of love and loss - the dangerous, dazzling brilliance of two unbridled spirits connecting, but then the huge pain when one of them dies prematurely.


Recounting the electrifying "bruv-affair" between these two iconic figures, Burning Both Ends is the story of two men who found in each other a true friend, and who loved each other as fiercely as they partied...

Excellent stuff - top marks to BBC Wales who produced the radio play

Archive's Sunday Comics - SWASHBUCKLING ADVENTURE

Back in the 1960s and '70s, British comics for children sold hundreds of thousands of copies on a weekly basis. The two biggest comics publishers, IPC and D. C. Thomson, alone required hundreds of a pages of original art for their many titles, which created full-time work for writers, artists and editors. Few of the professionals involved at the time envisaged the industry's eventual collapse or can fully explain its causes. "Kids today don't want comics; they're uncool" is a pat answer of doubtful truth.

Like many other Spanish artists who were recruited to help fill the pages of comics, despite the complications of working through agencies and translators, Matías Alonso has in recent times followed a different career path, similar to Martin Salvador's. (See last week's Sunday Comic). Writing about Alonso at the Illustration Art Gallery website, comics bibliographer and repackager Steve Holland says, "His last known contributions to British comics appeared in the early 1990s when he drew strips for Judy Picture Library and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By then Alonso had established himself in Spain as a painter – noted for his landscapes of northern Spain and of Spanish ports with boats jostling in the water – and has had his work exhibited in Barcelona and Madrid."

Alonso is chiefly recognized by the British comics-collecting fraternity for his contributions to various IPC war picture libraries (complete, 64-page graphic novellas), Thomson's similar Commando, and the Thomson weeklies – primarily The Victor (over 23 years), plus Bullet, Judy, Diana, Debbie and Emma. 

But among Alonso's early assignments for the British market were two eight-page historical strips, The Sea Adventurers and The Fighting Cavalier, which appeared complete in the Odhams' Boys' World Annuals for 1968 and 1969 respectively. We've already run the second of these as an Archive Sunday Comic. Here is the first, written in 1966 by Keith Chapman and drawn by Alonso.   


NEXT ISSUE (week) - in the best tradition of comic books we have a special Christmas themed story - now that's what I call Sunday Comics

 

Walkers, Walkers everywhere 3 - I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Released during the very real horrors of World War II this was the second horror film from producer, Val Lewton, the first being the iconic Cat People, and if you think Seth Graham Smith was the first to mix zombies and the classics with Pride and Prejudice with Zombies then think again. Lewton adjusted the original script to be a loose adaptation of Jane Eyre. Lewton borrowed the story, which is set in a plantation, from Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, but set in it on the island of St. Sebastian. Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), an innocent and pure Canadian nurse, accepts a position on the troubled Holland family plantation and in the best creaky old horror film fashion all is not what it seems.


Ignore the cheesey title which makes it sound like a film along the lines of, I was a Teenage Werewolf because I Walked is, like Cat People before it, a cut above most of RKO’s horror content. It went unappreciated by the critics of the day with the New York Times calling it dull and disgusting, but over the years it has rightly attained classic status and is these days regarded as one of Lewton’s best films, if not superior to The Cat People it is at least its equal. The voodoo element of the film is cleverly understated and it is not clear to the viewer if Jessica Holland, wife of the plantation owner, is actually under a supernatural spell or the victim of some strange tropical illness. Modern viewers may find it slow but it is one of the best pre-Romero zombie movies. There’s also a great joke when the disclaimer in the opening credits about the characters and events presented in the film denies any similarity to “actual persons, living, dead or possessed”.

Well worth seeking out.

Want an all new zombie fix -


The Dead Walked by Vincent Stark

Some said it was a virus
Others called it an act of God
Either way the result was the same when the dead walked

eBook price hike sees self publishers boom

FROM THE UK DAILY MAIL

It's bad news for anyone who has eBook readers such as Amazon's Kindle, Kobo's readers, or Barnes and Noble's Nook sitting under the Christmas tree.
An agreement between six major publishers has seen prices rocket for many books worldwide - some of which are more expensive than the paper version.
The agreement includes major publishing houses such as HarperCollins and Penguin.
The agreement reportedly forbids retailers from discounting eBooks without a publisher's permission.
It's seen a huge surge in 'self-published' books as users of eBook readers turn to cheaper authors to escape rising prices.
In the early days of eBooks, Amazon drove sales of its Kindle eBook reader by discounting heavily - leading readers to see eBooks as a 'bargain' version of their favourite reads.
But that seems no longer to be the case.
Consumers are increasingly angry at being charged more for an electronic version that they can't easily lend out or give away - even 'lending' schemes for eBooks tend to be tightly controlled and difficult to use.
The Kindle edition of this year's eBook bestseller, Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs is $20.76 - the paper one is $17.49.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Ken Follet's novel Fall of Giants was more expensive in an eBook version than it is in a physical version in the U.S. - $18.99 as opposed to $16.50 for the paper edition.
The price for the Kindle Edition has now abruptly fallen to $7.49 - perhaps an indication of the fact that publishers and retailers are sensitive about the pricing issue.

Valentine Macca

"This will sound like 1920-1940, the time when my father was 20. These are songs I heard, my family, my uncles, everybody sang. And there will be pieces that I've written, but in this style,"

So said Paul McCartney and he's talking about his new album, Valentine and Beatle nut that I am, I'm excited by this. Macca may have gone through a stale patch some time ago but his last few albums have all been uniformly good and his Fireman album, Electrical Arguments is a masterpiece.

"I worked with Diana Krall, and great jazz musicians like John Clayton. This is an album very tender, very intimate. It's an album on the way we listen work with a glass of wine or a cup of tea. From the background music." 

It sounds like an album with tracks along the line of Honey Pie, When I'm 64, You're Mother should Know and others of that ilk - sounds like er - gear, groovy, fab to me but what is realy exciting is that McCartney mentioned another album next year and the rumors are that it'll be a follow up to electric arguments. Now that would be fab.

Captain America co-creator dies

Joe Simon, a comic book industry pioneer whose defining career moment came in the dark days of March 1941 when he delivered a star-spangled superhero named Captain America, has died. He was 98. Simon died Wednesday night in New York City after a brief illness, according to a statement from his family, and his death adds a solemn final note to the 70th anniversary of his greatest creation, Captain America, who leaped across the big screen this summer with the Marvel Studios film "Captain America: The First Avenger." That film grossed $369 million in worldwide box office and earned strong reviews despite early skepticism about the 21st century pop culture potential of a Roosevelt-era character who looks like a walking American flag.


Simon created Captain America with Jack Kirby, a key figure in American comics, and the two would work together for various publishers and as comic books went from quirky confections to American mythology.

He's still not James Bond, you know

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