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Alien Nation

Last week I went up to Newcastle for Alien Nation, a two-day conference on telefantasy (i.e. British SF, fantasy, and horror television). James Chapman’s Inside the TARDIS and Catherine Johnson’s Telefantasy battled for citation supremacy, but surely the fairy godmother of the conference was Network DVD, purveyors of retro television series to the discerning. Gone are the days when washed out Nth generation video copies of UK Gold repeats were the only available window onto childhood memories. Network, we salute you. (Warning: clicking on the link to Network...
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England and nowhere

This weekend my friend A. kindly did all the driving so that we could attend the Sixth Annual TS Eliot Festival at Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire. Yes, a TS Eliot festival. You can see the programme here. So a mixture of poetry readings, academic papers, music, and fannish squee, all a hundred yards from the church that inspired Little Gidding (which long-term followers of my life will know is my favourite poem). Ted Hughes reads: here and here. The dull facade and the tombstone Inside the church Simon Armitage did a fantastic job reading Little Gidding. He came...
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“So educational!”

On Saturday, I went with two good friends to the Rereading Georgette Heyer conference at Lucy Cavendish College, and very good it was too. Apparently – and remarkably, to my mind – it is the first conference to be devoted to Heyer’s works. I think there were around 80 of us in attendance, and the conference organizers had sadly had to close bookings. The highlight of the day for me was the short talk given by Jennifer Kloester, author of Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, who has spent the last few years researching a new biography of Heyer. She...