If you cast your mind back a long way, you’ll recall that film director and TV producer McG (in the negative column: Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels 2, Fast Lane et al; in the plus column: Supernatural, erm) wanted to remake Channel 4’s Spaced for Fox TV in the US. He didn’t ask any of the original cast – Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes, Mark Heap – or director Edgar Wright; in fact, the first they heard about it was on the Internet. Needless to say, they weren’t best pleased.
The US remake of Spaced didn’t get anywhere. Now a four-minute chunk of the pilot has emerged and you can see why.
I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
