celticman's blog

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...

David Halberstam was killed in a car crash in 2007, clichéd as it is, his memory lives on here. This is a book all American citizens need to read before saluting the flag. Old Glory, American Presidents should be handed it when they are sworn in and take office. The Korean War began on 25 th June 1950 and lasted three years. The forgotten war, a stepping stone into Vietnam. Military historian S.L.A Marshall described it as ‘the century’s...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0b8cfcj/japans-secret-shame?suggid=b0b8cfcj In May 2017, twenty-nine year old Shiori Ito, claimed she had been raped by a television journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi. They had met in a Tokyo sushi bar. Ito hoped Yamaguchi would help her break into journalism and was willing to work as an intern. He was well connected to Japan’s elite, having written an authorised biography of the Prime Minister of Japan,...