celticman's blog

Debut screenwriter and director Daniel Kokotajalo weaves together apostasy in Kingdom Hall, and strands of growing sexuality and defiance in a North of England family setting. Middle-aged, Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran) has two teenage daughters and holds on to Jehovah Church doctrine like a nursing mother. The gold standard here is Jeanette Winterton’s autobiographical 1985 novel, adapted as a 1990 BBC serial, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The...

My old mate Jim McLaren invited me to the Christmas show for pensioners, even though I’m the same age as him and I’m not doddery, yet, although I can’t remember the last time I was at Panto and I hate Christmas. And I especially detest people who put their Christmas decorations up after Halloween and then wait until near Easter to put wee bunnies and eggs wrapped in red ribbons up on their walls. And you know what I think of people who buy...

Episode One: For King and Country https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0brjshr/wwi-the-last-tommies-series-1-1-for-king-and-country This is the kind of documentary series that the BBC does so well using archive footage and interviewing those that remember The Great War. We are shown a Zeppelin, which could travel at eighty miles per hour and carry two tons of explosive and told about the raid on Hull. An eyewitness remembered how shocking it...

I had a theory that HHhH stood for Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, but I wasn’t sure who or what the other H stood for. I wasn’t sure why three of the H were capitalised and one wasn’t. I was wrong in the right way. Hitler, Fuhrer, number one in the Reich, Himmler perhaps with the largest powerbase and his number two, but it was Herr Reinhard Heydrich who was ‘killer bureaucrat’ and gloried in being known as ‘the most dangerous man in the Reich’ who...

Panorama, BBC 1, BBCiPlayer, editor Rachel Jupp. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bb6yw0/panorama-syrias-chemical-war https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bnfn0d/a-dangerous-dynasty-house-of-assad-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bp1b9v/a-dangerous-dynasty-house-of-assad-series-1-episode-2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bpyvvh Civil War in Syria has lasted seven years, around 13 million of its citizens...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxjJZSgY_mA https://www.channel4.com/programmes/child-of-mine/on-demand/65727-001 One in 200 hundred births end in stillbirth. This documentary follows three couples through the ordeal and deals sensitively with the issues of loss and pain. In one London borough the Registrar dealt with six babies that were born dead that week. Spoiler: It will make you cry. My mum lost her first-born child, Michael, and she might...

Goldstone BBC 4, BBCiPlayer, written and directed by Ivan Sen. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08x19x1/goldstone?suggid=b08x19x1 Mystery Road, BBC 4, BBCiPlayer, written by Michaeley O'Brien and directed by Rachel Perkins. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bl5l7q/mystery-road-series-1-1-gone If there’s a drama series on BBC 4, usually, I’m watching it. After the medieval Spanish drama, The Plague , I watched Mystery Road . No...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bn6tr3/storyville-jailed-in-america Roger Ross Williams recalled the time he first attended school in his home town of Easton, Pennsylvania and a white kid called him ‘nigger’. The white kid’s mum chastised him and told him not to do that or he would come and burn their house down. Here we are in Trump’s America, before the moron’s moron got to play at being presidential. Here we are in Trump’s America...

The Way of All Flesh is the way of man. I gave it a chance, got to page 50 and cut the cord. Read on. Edinburgh in 1847, was almost there on the page, but the narrators Raven and Sarah didn’t wind their way into my heart. Because it is not for me, does not mean it is not for you. That is the fickle way of all books.

hubris noun excessive pride or self-confidence. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bmbhzb/the-bank-that-almost-brok... Remember Blythe Duff, the actress who played Detective Jackie Reid in Taggart whose famous catchphrase, ‘Where’s the body?’ became much parroted. Ten years on Blythe Duff is the narrator in search of the body of capitalism, the rise and fall of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the biggest bailout in British history,...