I chat here, I chat there. I’m just one of those sociable types that loves to interact with people on all levels.
Plus I love to have a good old natter about all the useless rubbish that surrounds your life and pick through all the pointless details of it all.
Kieron Yates and Matt Tempest report from Paris on the Vélib bike hire system that has brough 20,000 bicycles to the streets and transformed the French capital overnight into a cycling metropolis. Can it work in London?
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Photo by Deep Blue
I’m ready for my close-up: Looking for Sweeney Todd, Originally broadcast 21/02/08
Recently brought to the attention of a new generation of media consumers through Tim Burton’s adaptation of the musical “Sweeney Todd: The demon barber of Fleet Street“, Todd has been terrifying Londoners for over 160 years. In a monologue written by Alex Fitch, comedienne Jessica Fostekew takes us on a tour of Sweeney’s haunts both actual and real from his birth in folklore and “penny dreadfuls” to his reincarnation as the star of biographies reprinted in the Daily Mail and a grand guignol avatar in the form of Johnny Depp. Jess and Alex try to sort out the facts of Sweeney’s “life” from the fiction through a literary landscape littered with comic strips, tabloid preoccupations and rivers running red with blood…
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Originally broadcast 14/02/08 as part of Strip! on Resonance 104.4 FM
The second half of Alex Fitch’s 2008 interview with Alan Moore – originally broadcast on Valentine’s day. Alex and Alan discuss Alan’s epic graphic novels Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier and look at Alan’s depictions of procreation in Swamp Thing and Miracleman
Excerpt from Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
Reality Check: ‘Other’ Cinema on DVD – Originally podcast at Sci-Fi London
Alex Fitch talks to Noel Lawrence, founder of the Other Cinema DVD label about their range of esoteric / underground movies and collections of short films such as The Net – The Unabomber, LSD and the internet, Experiments in Terror, Decasia and Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y…
Jack Thurston is away and in his place Amy Cooper presents a show devoted to the swashbuckling Trixie Chix, London’s female fixed wheel freestylers. Will Amy and her sit-up-and-beg town bike cut the mustard with the trackstanding, bike polo playing, long skidding, backwards circling Trixies? Find out…
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Clever boy Lekonik (Amir Heshmati) has his finger in several musical pies. He can make beats as well as the next man but uses his film background to create truly singular tracks that make your ears prick up as soon as you hear them.
One of those tracks is played here: “Kitchen†where each screen shot corresponds to the sound it produced until the sounds layer up to make an intriguing and singular piece.
Amir discusses his current project based on his home town Shiraz in Iran, his family, Iranian culture and film and we are treated to four of tracks.
Originally broadcast 14/02/08 as part of Strip! on Resonance 104.4 FM
The first half of Alex Fitch’s 2008 interview with Alan Moore – originally broadcast on Valentine’s day. Alex and Alan discuss Alan’s epic graphic novel Lost Girls, from its beginnings – serialised in the horror anthology Taboo – to its final printing 16 years later as a beautiful three volume slipcased hardback published by Top Shelf.
Excerpt from Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
Visit the home of this episode at archive.org
Links: Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies – an article on the portrayal of women in comics by Alan Moore (circa 1983) …
Paul Gravett interviews Alan Moore …
Alex’s previous interview with Alan part one, part two, part three …
Extracts (and a very cool photo) from Alan’s recent interview with Word magazine …
Index of Alan Moore interviews available on the web … Wikipedia page on Lost Girls …
Top Shelf productions (publishers of Lost Girls) website …
Gosh! Comics website
Comics news…
The nominations for this year’s Eagle Awards have started – www.eagleawards.co.uk…
If I might use this blog to make some suggestions… You can get a full list of all the comic book creators I’ve interviewed over the last year and a half at podcasts.resonancefm.com and I’d like to show my appreciation for their contibutions to this show – so if you’d like to vote for say Simon Spurrier or any of the Manga Jiman creators for favourite newcomer writer or artist respectively, that might be cool, or the likes of Alan Moore, Leah Moore, John Reppion, Ian Edgington, Rich Johnston, Paul Cornell etc. for favourite comics writer, they deserve it. Favourite combined writer / artist – I think Bryan Talbot is without peers in this category* – , favourite artist (spreadable between inkers, pencillers, colourists etc.) – John McCrea, Mark Buckingham, Charlie Adlard, Sean Phillips, Duncan Fegredo, D’Israeli, Frazer Irving, Melinda Gebbie**,(Resonance’s very own) Mark Stafford all seem like good candidates to me…
I’ve not interviewed any letterers as yet – I’m happy to recommend Todd Klein** on Alan Moore’s behalf – but will try and do so in the next few months. The only editor I’ve interviewed is Matt Smith, a year ago, but he continues to do good work on 2000AD…
Publisher: Self Made Hero (Nevermore) and Rebellion (200AD) are up there already, but Modern Monstrosity (Tales from the flat) deserve a nomination…
Nominating comics and graphic novels (particularly American) is very much down to personal taste – all the above creators and everyone else I’ve interviewed has done very good work over the last year – though it would be remiss of me not to suggest Tales from the Flat for best British Black and White comic, The Mark of Aeacus for favourite new comic book, Alice in Sunderland for favourite new Graphic Novel and Pat Mills’ Nemesis the Warlock book 3 for favourite reprint.
In terms of related media – the Forbidden Planet International blog has supported this show throughout the last year, so gets my recommendation for best favourite website, though Bugpowder, London Underground Comics and Journalista!*** are all very deserving too. If we can get Oli Smith’s London Underground Comics video podcasts listed under favourite TV / film (going for the loosest definition of the words), that would be great too.
Finally the roll of honour – at the risk of being terribly egotistical, may I suggest me, Alex Fitch in the category of “entrepreneur whose achievements have… increased public awareness (of comics)”? (I know it says “in print”, but then I do publicise the show in [electronic] print)
That said, I noticed Paul Gravett and Ed Hillyer haven’t won in the past and are far more deserving than me! (Shameless self-publicist Oli Smith is after nomination as well and as I guess he’s the Barack to my Clinton, he doesn’t need any extra help from me!)
*as the Eagle awards are the comics equivilent of the BAFTAs, I’m going to only recommend British creators except for those with **two asterixes as Melinda and Todd get honorary British status for working on Lost Girls…
Also *** Journalista! regularly promotes Panel Borders (though weirdly, not Strip!) as well, so we like them!
I was waiting to pay for some petrol at the local service station when for no reason became tense with the anticipation that something exciting and unexpected was going to happen.
Nothing exciting or unexpected happened but it was the highlight of my week. So the moment wasn’t completely wasted.
Growing Communities is a pioneering social enterprise based in Hackney, North London that provides sustainable food for local people. It also serves a best-practice model for our future, low-carbon food production. In partnership with farmers on the outskirts of London their organic box scheme supplies 300 households with fruit and veg for as little as £6 a week. Most of the salad leaves in the boxes are grown on Growing Communities’ urban market gardens which is the only organically certified growing land in London. Their farmers market in Stoke Newington is the only weekly, fully-organic market in the UK. The Low Carbon Show met up with co-founder and director, Julie Brown to talk about food swaps, seasonal feasts and community orchards.
