celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000lb9c/anthony I’m a fan of writer Jimmy McGovern's work rooted in Merseyside and working-class life. His production company can pretty much sell what he produces to the BBC. His focus here is the murder of eighteen-year-old Anthony Walker. A black kid murdered by an ice-pick through his head in a Liverpool park, in an unprovoked racist attack in 30 th July 2005. His two assailants received life sentences...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000l9rg/the-last-wave-series-1-1-five-hours https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000l9rl/the-last-wave-series-1-2-the-return I’m a bit of telly snob. If it’s on BBC 4 and its got subtitles I’m usually watching it. Part of my hangover from bingeing on Wallander . The Last Wave is a French drama with subtitles, therefore it ticks one of the boxes. Unfortunately, there’s no introspective morbid detective...

Miriam Margolyes has done England, she’s done Trump’s United States and now she’s been sent on another two month road trip to see how Australia works (or doesn’t). Honeyed days indeed for an 82-year-old ‘fat, Jewish, lesbian’ (her words). Same old faces, popping up everywhere. I like the idea of Miriam Margolyes being unshakeable and having shock value, but this just seems like more jobs for the boys, although of course she’s not and it’s some...

I picked up this book and put it down a few times. I doubt if I’d have read it, but for one thing—it was Bob’s book. He carried it around like a lucky rabbit paw in his rucksack (not so lucky for the rabbit). Mostly in the first 150 pages of the book, around the middle of the book, Bob scribbled messages to himself in biro. He underlined words like Urbie and wrote things like ‘Visible From Space So We r Told’. Adding a tick mark to quote from...

Graeme Armstrong (2020) The Young Team Gore Vidal is attributed with the quote, ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little’. Graeme Armstrong is not a friend of mine. But the title of his book, The Young Team needs no detailed sociological explanation. I don’t need to go searching for definitions in The Urban Dictionary . I’m proud to be working class, less proud to have a chib mark on my face and knocked guys out and been a baw hair away...

‘Witches Sail in Eggshells’ is a quote from Meg, a character in a story of the same name, but also a playful aside from Keiza, the bewitcher of the unnamed protagonist. It bookends a collection of seventeen short stories of around 150 pages. I think the first story in the collection, ‘Hagstone,’ is the best short-story in the collection, and the last, ‘Witches Sail in Eggshells’, next best—you may think differently. Short-stories bewitch in...

Mrs America, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, written by Dahvi Waller and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08ggl84/mrs-america-series-1-1-phyllis https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08gglyp/mrs-america-series-1-2-gloria It’s 1971, American troops are still fighting in Vietnam. Richard Nixon is President and is engaged in ongoing peace talks with his USSR counterpart, President Brezhnev. Phyllis Schlafly (Cate...

Storyville, Welcome to Chechnya: The Gay Purge, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, director David France. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000kjnt/storyville-welcome-to-chechnya-the-gay-purge Here we have Claud Cockburn’s maxim as a rule of thumb, ‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied’. Director David France’s documentary shows clearly that gay lives don’t matter in Chechnya, or in Russia, generally. Imagine George Michael had went...

Diana Wilson got allocated one of the new builds in Trafalgar Street, 2003-4. She was much the same age as Ricky Ross, Deacon Blue, and Dignity has become a bit of a naff-classic. In those days of the late 1950s a Daily Record cost 2d, now it cost 85p. You could buy a bungalow in Great Western Road and have change from £125. Black-and-white telly, but not for all. Most couldn’t afford it, even with Radio Rentals. Crowds flocked to new X-Ray...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/blue-is-the-warmest-colour Wow, Mary Whitehouse, this was a sizzler. To think back in the 1970s I used to get red faced watching The Sweeney , when they showed a bit of tit. This would have been a swift case of spontaneous combustion and my charred remains found glued to the false leather settee. Whoopee, finally, a blue movie on the telly, but I’m too old for it now! But if you cut away the nudity, which I...