Hello, there. I’m Darren, and this is a collection of stuff I’ve written over the years, mainly about music but there’s some other stuff too, such as film, TV and merch. You’ll also find the odd bit of promo for videos and music I’ve made. Thanks for dropping by.
Talk about April showers. I needed a cold one when I found out that Tom Baker and Philip Hinchcliffe were going to be sharing the stage at the NFT1 for this, the fourth of the BFI’s 'Doctor Who at 50’ events, on Saturday 20 April.
The story chosen to represent Baker’s Doctor was the 1977 whodunnit The Robots Of Death, the penultimate production of the Hinchcliffe era - that peerless two-year period between The Ark In Space and The Talons Of...
It’s 27 April. Saturday evening. Dusk. Normally at this time I’d be at home in front of the telly watching Doctor Who. But tonight I have other plans - plans that I can’t record to my V+ box and watch tomorrow. It’s hard to believe, I know, but sometimes real life is worth venturing out for.
So I’ve straddled the train and ridden the Tube to Kennington, south London, for An Evening With William Russell (all caps, you’ll note, for the...
On 10 March, I attended a BFI screening of the 1971 Doctor Who story The Mind Of Evil, in which the Doctor pits his wits against his arch-enemy the Master and his mind-sapping Keller Machine. This screening was the first time that this story had been seen entirely in colour, in public, since its original broadcast.
For the unaware, the BBC junked the original tapes in 1973 (it’s a long story), and in recent decades fans have been watching The Mind Of Evil on tapes sourced from black-and-white 16mm film copies, alongside a few colour clips that survived thanks to a domestic recording someone had made in the US. But now, thanks to the efforts of the Doctor Who Restoration Team, the entire six-part serial exists in colour once again.
The announcement of Project MotorMouth last September was bittersweet. A Doctor Who convention featuring Doctors 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10 - that’s Davison, Baker (C, not T), McCoy, McGann and Tennant - was an appealing prospect, but the reason for the get-together was linked to some far less pleasant news.
“Janet Fielding has a new fight on her hands,” said the event website, “not against the Daleks or Cybermen but against cancer”.
If you have an interest in vintage British horror films, you can’t have failed to notice that Hammer’s UK Blu-ray releases this year have got fans of the studio in a bit of a dither. Battles have raged online over various issues, from image and audio quality to aspect ratio and framing, and, perhaps most controversially, CGI tinkering.
To its credit, Hammer has responded in detail to many of the issues, even recalling and reissuing one product to correct an audio fault. However, there...
"You are invited to attend a day in celebration of Shane Briant." So ran the (A5, stiff and rather good-looking) ticket that I received in the post back in May, after despatching a £30 cheque to Donald Fearney. A newbie to Mr Fearney’s legendary Hammer-themed get-togethers, I didn’t really know what to expect, but I knew that the opportunity to meet Shane Briant - for the actor would be in attendance at this celebration - wasn’t one I should pass...
Last Saturday night I went along to Sound Of Fear, a two-part event at London’s Southbank Centre. The main draw for me was a 45-minute set from Alan Howarth, the musician and composer who collaborated with John Carpenter on many of his much-loved '80s scores, such as Escape From New York, Halloween III: Season Of The Witch and Prince Of Darkness.
The performance in the venue’s Purcell Room, which I loved every pulsating second of, covered all these...
Is that the time? I’d better have another rummage around the giant-ape genre, I think. Today, I’m taking a look at Konga (1961), starring Michael Gough, who died in March aged 94. As always with these in-depth reviews, beware: there are heavy spoilers ahead, including the film’s ending.
A light aircraft crashes in a Ugandan jungle, igniting in a ball of flame. It’s feared that its famous occupant, English botanist Doctor Charles Decker (Michael Gough), was killed in the explosion...
Logging into my site today, I noticed that traffic had spiked around one particular page: a short piece about the day in October 2007 when I made a special journey to Collectormania, Milton Keynes, to meet Elisabeth Sladen, aka Sarah Jane Smith from Doctor Who. In that blog, I recounted our brief chat, though reading it afresh it’s noticeable to me that I missed out a key detail - most likely because...
The success of January’s Barbara Shelley and Linda Hayden signing seems to have spurred events organiser 10th Planet on to book more Hammer actors. Last Saturday, in a conference room at Barking’s library, I had the pleasure of meeting John Carson, who starred in three of the studio’s films: The Plague Of The Zombies (1966), Taste The Blood Of Dracula (1970) and Captain...
