iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

"Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand." - Hal Holbrook, All The President's Men (1976)

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

"I directed by instinct! My instincts have always been... very bad."

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

So Burnham bottles it on water nationalisation. What a surprise - to absolutely no one. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

HONTAR: We must work in the world. The world is thus. ALTAMIRANO: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world. Ronald Pickup & Ray McAnally, The Mission

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Someone should sit Andy Burnham down in front of The Crown episode Act of God, about the Great London Smog of 1952, if he really thinks that the ongoing heatwaves are nothing more than "weather".

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Reposted by Alistair Owen

Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Checkmate, Nige.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

"I know what I have to do now. I've got to keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring." - Tom Hanks, Cast Away

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Going from Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham is like watching Jaws 2 and finding that Amity Island still has the exact same mayor.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

This really is a delight. I picked it up on DVD, on spec, years ago, and it was 3 quid very well spent...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

On the blog today: my contribution to Rupert Lally's new book You Need To See This - a foreword, and a friendship, inspired by a shared love of Bruce Robinson's greatly underrated film Jennifer 8. www.alistairowenwriter.com/blog/you-nee...

alistairowenwriter.com

You Need To See This — Alistair Owen

You Need To See This

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Name a TV show you're positive no-one remembers but you. Despite being directed by Danny Boyle, written by GF Newman and starring Martin Shaw, Fiona Shaw and Roy Dotrice - with a score by OMD...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

A shadow history of modern Russia is pretty much how I describe them to anyone who hasn't read them. And I've only realised on this first revisit that you have to match your reading to the pace of his prose. If you read the books fast, for their plots, you miss everything that's great about them.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Love this speech, and this film. Right up there with the great 70s conspiracy thrillers, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. So high energy that you can easily miss how sophisticated it is.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

He reminds me of le Carré: a style and tone entirely of his own and completely without cliché, using the conventions of genre to unconventional ends.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

"We've gone through evolution, now we're going through de-evolution. Everything is breaking down. No borders, no boundaries. No limits, no treaties." - Martin Cruz Smith, Wolves Eat Dogs (2004)

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Had a J. R. Hartley moment today, and considered buying a secondhand copy of one of my own books, as I've almost run out of author copies. Reader, I resisted.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

"The strategy is ridiculous - try to out-Tory the Tories. But finally, I have to remind you of something you seem to have forgotten: we're not bloody Tories, and so it's a game at which we can't win!" - David Hare, The Absence of War (National Theatre 1993, BBC 1995) www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

bbc.co.uk

BBC Two - Screen Two, The Absence of War

Labour leader George Jones battles with his party on the general election campaign trail.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

So looking forward to this, in the absence of more Detectorists. The only thing which has come close to that for me, for gentle characterful comedy, is Ghosts.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

An iPod! An iPod dock! I'm not alone!

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

I mean, you would, wouldn't you? Without so much as a pause to clean your peep.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

It's strange how a movie this good, with those credits, made between Green Card and The Truman Show, could become almost a lost entry in Peter Weir's filmography. As far as I know, it's not even available on DVD or Blu-ray in the UK - but it's still one of his finest, most ambitious achievements.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

The Odeon on Union Street! I saw The Remains of the Day there, in a seniors screening (I was 18). I saw Crimson Tide there, when Tomorrow Never Dies was sold out. I saw The Bourne Identity there, when I should have been home writing. I saw The Village there, at a bargain weekday matinee. Farewell...

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Reposted by Alistair Owen

Will Wiles @willwiles.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Delighted to have received a grant from a submerging writers foundation, which supports mid-career authors while they age, procrastinate and feel their early promise ebb away. Grants like this are essential to the production of unmarketable work of limited appeal.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

You're gonna need a bigger table...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

Haven't seen this for years. Used to have it on VHS - and possibly on Betamax before that! Like the original Dad's Army film, it's a hugely enjoyable and surprisingly deft summary of the TV series. And set in the winter, so perfect Christmas viewing.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Thanks, Nick. And enjoy your re-watch. It's probably in my top ten films.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

The wardrobe scene with Jack and Douglas? Or Jack's bedside farewell to Joy? I watched this last year, shortly before my mum died, so I'm going to watch it again this year, on the anniversary - in a double bill with the film of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I think she would have liked that.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

The big idea, I think, is the cyclical nature of evil - the exact opposite of the novel, which is about the enduring power of love. It's mesmerising cinema, but the characters are like pieces on a chessboard. Kubrick captured the atmosphere of King's story, without the humanity.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

And, of course, Stoppard also rewrote Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Spielberg (uncredited, like the Bourne script), so it seems Mamet rolled these things together and came up with an apocryphal story all of his own...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Marber's tribute is great. Mamet's memory is not. The director was Greengrass, not Spielberg, and the film was Green Zone, not Jaws (Stoppard rewrote The Bourne Ultimatum). Stoppard did say, after casting him in the Ros & Guil film, that he'd rather see Jaws without the shark than without Dreyfuss.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

He was someone I always wanted to meet, but never did. This piece makes you feel as if you have. Thank you for sharing it.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

If I had free rein (fantasy filmmaking!), I'd adapt The Closed Circle and Middle England as a continuing drama, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim as a limited series (French film notwithstanding), and The House of Sleep as a feature (inherent challenges notwithstanding)...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

FADE IN: SOUND ONLY, over film company logos. The rhythmic trundle of a moving train, and a tinny tannoy announcement: WOMAN'S VOICE: If you see something that doesn't look right, speak to staff or text British Transport Police. We'll sort it. See it. Say it. Sorted. CAPTION: Part One - See It

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

No Coes, though? Somebody really should remedy that...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

May need to schedule a couple of Tom Stoppard double bills soon...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

My late Mum's programme for Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, which we saw at the NT in spring 1993. That cast, though...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

Genuinely saddened by this. I tried to interview him for two of my books; I still have his gracious demurral on elegant notepaper. The NT production of Arcadia is indelible in my mind, and his scripts for Shakespeare in Love and The Russia House are sublime. RIP. www.theguardian.com/stage/galler...

theguardian.com

Tom Stoppard – a life in pictures

Award-winning playwright Tom Stoppard has died aged 88

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Good to see Shepherd's brilliant performance in Peter Flannery & Helena Kennedy's 1988 TV series Blind Justice mentioned here - a show so anti-establishment (the original title was Radical Chambers) that the BBC never repeated it or released it on video or DVD... www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

theguardian.com

Jack Shepherd obituary

Versatile actor, director and playwright who found television fame in the detective series Wycliffe

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Share a ‘90s movie you think deserves more love

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

"Savour it! Rejoice with great gladness! With great gladness!"

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

That's interesting. I'd never considered that. But yes, it is apolitical - unlike, say, The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

WarGames is in the same class as Capricorn One: thoroughly entertaining yet thought-provoking techno-thrillers which were big hits in their day but are now, curiously, overlooked. Both are huge favourites of mine.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

🎂 Happy 25th birthday to my first Q&A book, #SmokingInBed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson. It was a Pick of the Week for Nicholas Lezard, a Book of the Year for David Hare and a career-starter for me. So here's to it, and the inimitable Mr Robinson, and everyone who's ever read it and loved it!🍷

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

I reviewed my favourite reads of 2025 for Shepherd Books: Year of the King by Antony Sher from @nickhernbooks.bsky.social, Karla's Choice by @nickharkaway.com and The Proof of My Innocence by @jonathancoe.bsky.social. I was asked to rank them, but all are first class... shepherd.com/bboy/2025/f/...

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

I thought it was riveting, right up there with my other favourite nuclear thrillers - WarGames, By Dawn's Early Light, and the original Fail Safe.

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Alistair Owen @alistairwriter.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

🎂 Happy 2nd Birthday to my 5th Q&A book, #TheMirrorAndTheRoad: Conversations with William Boyd. Observer, Independent, iNews & TLS all called it "fascinating", and Slow Horses author Mick Herron hoped to find it in his Christmas stocking. Cheers to that! 🍾 www.alistairowenwriter.com/the-mirror-a...

alistairowenwriter.com

The Mirror and the Road — Alistair Owen

An exclusive series of interviews with bestselling author and screenwriter William Boyd

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