• Strike Season 5 Filming Now

    ByNick Jeffery
    1 Comment

    Brontë Film and Television, J. K. Rowling’s own television production company has started filming for Troubled Blood. Filming has completed in Skegness. On location work in St Mawes and Falmouth will be completed next week.

     

     

    The weather for filming in St Mawes turned suitably inclement at times, if not quite to the same level as the storms of 2014.

    To follow the filming, and to see some spectacular photography, you can follow Stikefans.com twitter account here.

    No definitive news on a release date yet, but it likely to air first on the BBC late 2022 or early 2023.

  • Rowling and Rugby

    ByNick Jeffery
    4 Comments

    Wales is my adopted home, and it’s national sport is Rugby, so I was pleased to discover that J. K. Rowling was a fan. I first started playing rugby as a 10 year old for my local town, and I have since supported the national sides (both England and Wales) and the county of Cornwall. Rowling started watching and supporting her national side of Scotland after she married her husband Dr. Neil Murray.

    “It’s not until I married a Scot that I was taken, not entirely willingly, to the rugby. And then I accidentally ended up enjoying the rugby. So there is hope for you. You can definitely convert.”

    J. K. Rowling on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio4, 28th April 2014

    To find out more about Rowling and Rugby, join me after the jump.

    Read More “Rowling and Rugby”

  • Rowling’s Norfolk Twitter Header Photo – Three Notes about Possible Meaning

    ByJohn
    6 Comments

     

    Three Quick Notes:

    (1) So What? Two days ago I shared my thoughts about the latest Fantastic Beasts movie trailer and yesterday it was exegesis of the Secrets of Dumbledore ensemble poster. Today I’ll attempt a deep dive into the new Rowling Twitter page header — and I think readers deserve some explanation of why I’m devoting so much time to what are in essence advertisements and place-holders.

    With respect to the trailer and movie poster, I confess to pretending without evidence that The Presence had something to do with their composition, which is in the end pretty far-fetched, not to say “silly.” Writing up the notes for each, though, allowed me the opening I wanted to talk about the Beasts franchise as another psychomachia allegory and to post links to Lana Whited’s ‘Here There Be Dragons (and Phoenixes)‘ posts. Mission accomplished.

    Rowling herself, however, tweeted five years ago that the pictures she uses as her Twitter headers reflect her current thinking. Or did she? Read More “Rowling’s Norfolk Twitter Header Photo – Three Notes about Possible Meaning”

  • ‘Ink Black Heart’ Listed at 976 Pages

    ByJohn
    3 Comments

    The good people at The Rowling Library noted this morning in their all-things-Rowling news summary that we have a new  page count for the sixth Cormoran Strike novel, Ink Black Heart.

    Amazon.com was updated with more information about The Ink Black Heart. The details section for the book used to show 944 pages (same as Troubled Blood), but now it was updated to 976, which I personally think will be the final count. The large print edition was updated as well, with 1536 pages!

    If Mr. Tarantino is correct in his surmise, Ink Black Heart will only be 3% longer than Troubled Blood. It should be noted, though, that being as long as or longer than Strike5 means:

    • Ink Black Heart will be the longest single work of fiction Rowling has ever published;
    • the parallel with the Potter series opposite number is broken (Half-Blood Prince was shorter than Order of the Phoenix, the longest Potter novel and, until Troubled Blood, the longest Rowling fiction); and 
    • Serious Rowling-Readers had best re-make whatever plans they had for the autumn months of 2022.

    I don’t know how much credibility to give an Amazon.com listing of a book-not-yet-in-print‘s page count this far from its date of publication, especially in light of the history of bad blood between the publisher and the online vendor with a de facto monopoly in book sales. I cannot think of any reason Amazon would intentionally misrepresent a page count, however, so it seems legitimate to conclude Ink Black Heart will indeed approach one thousand pages.

    The good news is that quantity and quality for Rowling do not seem to exist in inverse proportion as they do for many writers. Her history, especially with the remarkable Troubled Blood, suggests, rather than bemoaning her need for an editor with some scissors (and an eye for Flints), we should be celebrating the largesse we are being promised. With Rowling-Galbraith, incredibly, ‘The more, the better.’

    I covet your comments and corrections, as always.

  • Save Noddy! The Donkeys of Skegness Fall on Hard Times

    ByLouise Freeman
    0 Comments

    Strike fans on Twitter have a vicarious front-row seat to the TV filming of Troubled Blood in Skegness, thanks to @CormStrikeFan, who has followed the cast and crew to the coast and is reporting on what he can see of the filming. Check out the Twitter link above to see some amazing pictures, including the actor cast as Steve Douthwaite, the inn cast as the Allerdice, and the car cast as the Ellacott Family Land Rover. To me, the most intriguing bit is that the hotel was decked out with Christmas swag, suggesting a major change in the timeline of the novel. This is in accordance with what happened in both the Career of Evil and Lethal White adaptations.

    Skegness is near the top of the list of Strike sites I would most like to visit, ranking right up there with Masham, St. Mawes and the White Horse of Uffington. I was curious about the donkeys Robin remembered from her childhood, and, searching the web, I learned that the century-old tradition was almost a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic, then nearly forced out of business by a robbery. Happily, supporters have pitched in to help the business, and a hand-reared foal has become somewhat of a celebrity, and a symbol of the business’s struggle to survive.

    I think Robin would be pleased. By my calculations, little Annabel should be about 8 1/2 this summer; prime donkey-riding age. Hopefully, the beasties will make it through the lean winter season and Auntie Robin will get to take her on a weekend outing once warmer weather arrives. And, just maybe there’s an Uncle Cormoran traveling companion by now. In the meantime, they are still taking donations.