celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0000fk0/tommy-burns?suggid=m0000fk0 In the week of another lacklustre Celtic performance in Europe, and, ironically, when Celtic visit Kilmarnock’s Rugby Park on Sunday, this is a wonderful tribute to the evergreen Tommy Burns who died ten years ago, at the age of 51, of skin cancer, who managed both teams. Why a boy from the Carlton was on Gaelic telly I don’t know, and don’t care, I loved it. Tommy loved...

Sometimes we get caught up in hype and say things like Any Human Heart is ‘unforgettable’. But I’d forgotten I’d already read this book. There was something vaguely familiar about The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart (LMS) 1906-1991 when the reader is told he dies of a heart attack and on his tombstone has chiselled Escritor , Writer, Ecrivain . It’s the bit in between those two dates that interest us and LMS has a Zelig like ability to...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p06g8bcy/trust-series-1-1-the-house-of-getty Donald Sutherland is the eponymous John Paul Getty senior in BBC’s big-budget drama. My knowledge of Getty was negligible. I knew he was one of the richest men in the world and I knew he had a pay phone in his house, so unpaying guests wouldn’t chisel him and make long-distance phone calls at his expense. Yep, tick that one off; it happens in this drama, which...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/married-to-a-paedophile Married to a Paedophile was, ironically, on at the same time as another outstanding piece of drama, Mother’s Day . The latter is conventional drama in that we start with tragedy and end in triumph – The Good Friday Agreement. The argument is implicit, cause and effect. Married to a Paedophile is more of a Greek tragedy in which, for example, solving a riddle Oedipus on the way to Thebes...

We think we know the bare bones of the history of the holocaust. Hitler as bogey man and the German nation following him to the abyss, where around six million Jews perished and many more minorities. That was my take on it. Not bad, around a D grade. But Snyder does more than root in the history of the past. He drags us into the present and the lessons are illuminating. For the German nation the war was portrayed as necessary, a colonial war to...

I watched The Reluctant Fundamentalist on BBC 2 recently. Mohsin Hamid was screenwriter and author, and the role of the narrator in the book Change[z] is much the same, but the plotting is slightly different. In particular, Changez's exotic girlfriend, Erica, in the book is given a backstory. Changez, in his doomed love affair, mirrors her doomed love affair. It's a short novel. Very few films are better than the book. Ben Hur is an example...

Hans Rosling is dead, but his work lives on here. Clichéd, I know. But Rosling does something we rarely do, he looks at the facts. And he concludes that the world is so much better than it’s ever been. He’s an optimist, a myth buster and all-round good guy. I’m none of these things. I’m a bit like Calimero, walking about under rainy skies with an egg-shell head and complaining ‘It’s an injustice. It’s an injustice’. This is a book I should...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bbbv4w/rip-it-up-series-1-1-blazing-a-trail https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bc3ljs/rip-it-up-series-1-2-success-and-excess https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bc3ljs/rip-it-up-series-1-2-success-and-excess Rip it Up and Start Again. Rip it Up and Start Again. That’s the lyrics to an Orange Juice song. I don’t know my contraltos from my tomatoes. Doesn’t matter. I loved Rip it Up , three hours...

I read both of these books very quickly in one day. Years ago I tried bending spoons when Uri Geller was on telly. It didn’t work then. Let’s just say it wouldn't work now. But good on him, I say, the multimillionaire got away with it. There’s that moment in Elmer Gantry when Burt Lancaster gets caught up in his own rhetoric he convinces himself he’s not a fraud. So far, so human. The most dangerous type of human is the one that is never wrong...

Prison, Channel 4, 9pm, produced and directed by Paddy Wivell. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/prison/on-demand/66913-001 https://www.channel4.com/programmes/prison/on-demand/66913-002 Durham Prison in the North East of England holds around 950 inmates on any given day. In the first episode there were no real surprises, apart from the prisoner that managed to smuggle a phone inside up his arse. He freely admitted to it on camera. There’s a...