The Second Act In A Blogger's Life

So, I’m back. Thank Stephen Gallagher, or blame Stephen Gallagher, which ever you see fit. I bumped into him the weekend before last and during the all too brief time we had to chat he urged me to resurrect this blog. Oddly enough, the following day a delightful and enchanting actress who I had been keeping entertained during her first time back in England since a shattering family bereavement, told me I was a wonderful teller of tales – and no, she hadn’t been drinking! Having already found myself toying with the idea of coming back for another go around. So those encounters were, I suppose, the final impetus I needed.

Truth be told, after the way things had turned out last year I really did need the time away to get things back in order. Taking these online ramblings out of the equation also allowed me to focus on the work currently at hand. As it happened, a short while after having the apartment to myself again, boxes were brought out of storage and transferred here so I could sort through an accumulation of annotated scripts, contracts, call sheets, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs, and publicity material. We may not be fully up to speed because time management is proving to be an alien concept to the person I’m partnered with – which occasionally infuriates me because we should have gotten much further ahead by now – but we’ve certainly made progress.

Those concerns aside, through the changing seasons I’ve rooted through files in the British Library, scoured the British Library’s Newspaper Library, and got to talk to the director Robert Fuest, the writer Brian Clemens (either side of a new Blu-Ray commentary he was participating in), the remarkably forthright Academy Award–winning costumer designer Julie Harris, and John Humphreys, the designer/sculptor who created Max Headroom. Hopefully the momentum will build, but for the time being I’m managing to push the project forward, discovering numerous truths that will eventually dispel the long–held legends that have previously seen print.

With all that on my plate, returning to the blog may seem like an utterly insane thing to do because I doubt I’ll be able to post as regularly as before. But when there are days when I come back from Colindale Newspaper Library – thankfully only a short bus ride away – having spun through reels of microfilm or leafed through bound volumes of periodicals looking to find the information that will fill some of the numerous gaps in the narrative and returned home with little or nothing of value, it’s good to have something to write at the end of the day.

They may not run to the same length as previous entries – some of which clocked in at over 6,000 words – but rest assured that short doesn’t always mean sweet. Having been on my best behaviour and seen where that got me... Well, if you’ve been here before you’ll know just what to expect.