Journal

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Alan on the radio...

Woke up to several dozen versions of this:

Hi Neil, in case you don't know, Alan Moore was on BBC Radio 4 this morning talking about some legal trouble Lost Girls might have with UK publication. There's a link to the broadcast here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/audio/full_alan_moore_interview.ram

but you'll need RealPlayer.

Thanks, John Wilson


Great interview. He talks about a lot more than the potential legal troubles [which, honestly, I can't see actually happening: the point is not that this is Peter Pan, the point is that it uses the reader's familiarity with the events of Peter Pan to impart significance to a completely different story... and according to the possibly correct Wikipedia entry, "...in 1988 the government had enacted a perpetual extension of some of the rights to the work, entitling the hospital to royalties for any performance or publication of the work. This is not a true perpetual copyright, however, as it does not grant the hospital creative control nor the right to refuse permission"].

Alan talks about the inspiration for Lost Girls, the accusations that a paedophile could use these books to "groom" a child, sexuality and its part of growing up, and the potential of pornography as an art form. And then the interview wanders over into Alan's troubles with Hollywood and gets very funny indeed.

It looks like there have been an amazing number of Peter Pan "sequels". But nothing in Lost Girls will ever be quite as traumatising as this.