celticman's blog

Last Tuesday I watched this documentary about the war photographer and photojournalist Don McCullen. Sometimes you like somebody and I liked Don McCullen. I’m biased, of course, his working class roots appealed to me. Brought up in London, I think it was Shoreditch, he won a scholarship to study art, but part of a big family he had to work, bring in money and stumbled into photography almost by accident. His early pictures of the working class...

I followed every stroke, grunt and whack, not on the telly, or even the radio, but whilst reading the Sunday papers. With the hot weather all windows and doors were open and Trisha over the back was prone to scream and shout like a five-year-old, with odd bursts of ‘Come on Andy.’ Well, I’m old enough to remember ‘C’mon Irene,’ sung by a couple of curly-haired down- and- outers wearing overalls. It even went to number 1. The last time I watched...

John Niven’s page in the Sunday Mail of what looked like a gallus young girl (but it could have been a boy) holding a home-made placard with the ‘step outside’ sentiment made me smile. Not for long. MORI polls of those under thirty-three show support for Tory leadership has grown. Similarly, one of the poll’s questions:‘is the creation of the welfare state one of Britain’s proudest achievements? And around seventy percent of those over forty-...

It’s a stupid question because everyone knows we’ve an aging population and with it comes the blight of dementia. My mum ended up in a Boquanran House and having been behind the scenes in many institutions I know exactly how they work. The product is people. ‘Homes’ are run for maximum profit and that means meeting the barest legal requirements. Panorama had a couple of tricks. One of them was to look at mortality rates. Simple but effective...

I grew up with Abba. I know that’s kind of sad, I wasn’t a rock- and- roll- wild child, into heavy metal, or even a Satanist. I listened to the charts on the radio, but not religiously. The first album I ever thought about buying was ‘Bat Out of Hell’ and it had been Number 1 for about 50 weeks and I had to ask who the singer was. I was so uncool I watched the Eurovision Song Contest and I remember Abba winning it with Waterloo. Abba have sold...

End of The Fall-- very disappointing. I was looking forward to it all being wrapped up, but there’s going to be another series. Dates on Channel 4 was quite good. I missed the start of Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012) directed by Alex Gibney BBC 4 10pm, but it was easy to catch up. Priests commit paedophilia. Priests are protected by the church. It follows the case of four deaf men who brought a case against the priest that...

I watched the first ten minutes of this last week. I didn’t even get to the first ad- break, because I know how the story goes. It’s a Shameless and Marv the junkie and Bullet the dog package that shows things might be bad with unemployment, poverty, crime and neglect, but that’s just my story, at least I’m not on television making-do. So here we had the junkie ‘shoppers’, nicking things for Dean Bell his wife and extended family of children and...

I watched this with interest. Benefica were in Celitc’s Champion’s league section. We drew 0-0 with them at Parkhead in the first game. It was neither a bad or good result. I felt if we went at them we could have won. They beat us easily in Lisbon. Because Chelsea won the European cup last year and because they are one of England’s premier teams I thought they’d win. I was right and wrong. Benefica were the better team and in the first half in...

The Fall, a contemporary thriller set in Belfast Northern Ireland, is shown on RTE and on BBC 2. Alan Cubbit is credited as creating the four part series. I’m not really sure what creating it means. Is he, for example, the writer or producer, does he own his own production company that sold the storyline or did he make the drama himself and sell it to RTE and BBC? Whatever he did, it’s quite gripping. With Belfast as a backdrop you expect...

Released 1993, written by Chazz Palmaterri directed by Robert De Niro and starring Robert De Niro and Chazz Palmaterrri. It’s 1960 in the Bronx and everything is Italian. Lorenzo Anello (Robert De Niro) drives a city bus for a living. His son Calogero (Francis Capro, aged 9) sometimes jumps on and accompanies him, to chat about baseball and be with his dad. But he’s a smart kid. When his dad drops him off and waits until he goes upstairs to the...