celticman's blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08s323v/broken-series-1-episode-1 I watched Episode 1 of Jimmy McGovern’s series Broken . It was meant to be on last Tuesday, but because of the Manchester bombing was held over for a week. I’m a fan of Jimmy McGovern. His dramas are usually about working-class people that are broken, in some way, and have to find a way forward. A sympathetic portrayal, and counterpoint to the propaganda from sources such as...

Richard Holloway’s Looking in the Distance , predates, his classic autobiographical account, Leaving Alexandria of leaving the Anglican church, where he was a Bishop of Edinburgh, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church and Gresham Professor of Divinity, which is quite a mouthful for an agnostic. This is a short volume. A working out of ideas, a companion piece to Godless Morality , which I’ve not read and not likely to read. It reminds me a bit...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rp0ld/jago-a-life-underwater?suggid=b08rp0ld If a documentary can be poetic, a meditation on life and death and the sea, then this is it. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea springs to mind. Rohani was different from the other kids, swimming underwater and hunting fish. He could hold his breath longer and as an adult his eardrums burst as he got to depths of twenty fathoms on mouthfuls of air. I had...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rg0bd/glasgow-1967-the-lisbon-lions?suggid=b08rg0bd Narrator Rory McCann had an easy job, everybody knows the score. Celtic were the first British team to win the European cup. Inter Milan had scored from the penalty spot in seven minutes, cancelled by an equalising second-half goal by Tommy Gemmell and a late winner from Stevie Chalmers. ‘You’re a legend John. You’re a legend.’ Bill Shankly famously said...

Winner of the 2017 Academy Award for best documentary this five-part series is an investment of time. The premium dividend is it shows how America is polarised around issues of class and race. Karl Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce is apt. OJ is the poster boy. A black all American boy that went to a white college, became the All American hero used by Hertz to sell their cars. ‘Go OJ,’...

Stephen Dunn Sweetness: Staying Alive Just when it seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend walking with a tumour, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except for the way I stumbled through it for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size hand-size and never seeming small. I acknowledge there’s no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain,...

I watched this on BBC iPlayer. It was shown over three consecutive nights and was based on the Rochdale child sex scandal. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8pvh/three-girls-series-1-episode-1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8s12/three-girls-series-1-episode-2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8vp5/three-girls-series-1-episode-3 There is institutional cover up, issues of class and racial bias. A blackness of themes that...

This book has not been officially release yet. I was lucky enough to buy a copy at West Dunbartonshire Festival of Words at Parkhall library on Monday night. Gail Honeyman was doing her first gig. Ahhhh, that’s nice. She seemed very nice and self-assured. It was the usual format of someone asking her questions about the book and Gail reading two short excerpts from the book. And later questions from the audience. She read, first page, first...

This is the penultimate book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It picks up where it left off in the second book, with ‘Middle Time’ and Elena Greco narrating what happened to her and her brilliant friend Lila Cerrulo after her disappearance in the winter of 2005. As the storyteller Elena has access to Lila’s motives and actions because her friend had given her diaries to her –asking her not to read them. She did, of course. There’s no...

It takes a war, a Great War, a Second World War to teach us values. It’s crude but effective. Thatcher before the Falkland’s War, behind in the polls, goes on to win in a landslide. The problem with the dead is they don’t stay dead. The Somme, six-million Jews, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The dead stay frozen, when homes fit for heroes remain unmade, and resurface minutes, hours, days, years, decades later as a soundbite to be counted off, or a source...