celticman's blog

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847 because women don’t write books, only they do. Heathcliffe is the hero, or should I say anti-hero. He’s got a hint of gypsy in him, a man’s man that marries Isabella Linton to spite his childhood sweetheart Catherine Earnshaw (hints of incest here) hangs Isabella’s dog from a gatepost to show what kind of man she’s marrying and beats his head against the branch...

It’s a catchy title that titillates. You know when you open the pages it won’t be like wading through text book squiggles of grey snails lining up to teach you something meaningful about the author’s life that you don’t want to know. It won’t try and regress you or teach you that God is on your side if you can just [well, fill in your own bit here]. To begin with Hudson’s book disappointed me. It has been described as autobiographical. Here, the...

It’s not everyday one gets a publicist. It’s a bit like a bald man going to the barbers. People just snigger behind your back (not that I’m bald, I just lack hair on selected parts of my head). I’d a meeting scheduled for 2 p.m. I’m notorious for forgetting people’s names. Last night, for example, I was talking for a couple of minutes with a guy at the bar. Usual sort of football chatter. Then he came out with it. ‘You don’t know who I am? Do...

Visibility is a trick of the light. Invisibility is a lack of publicity. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith suggested in the Preface to The Great Crash 1929 : ‘No author can be fully trusted when describing the quality of his own work’. I am not allowed to say buy Lily Poole because it is a really good book, or a really bad book - negative reviews also increase sales - but no reviews means stasis. It means invisibility and equilibrium...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b047zl98 I meant to watch this when it was recently on BBC 3, but the World Cup was on. There’s a joke there about some folk finding that murder, but we’ll skate over that. I won’t be giving any plots points away if I tell you Reece (played by Royce Pierreson) ends up killing Ashley (Georgina Campbell) and it’s based on a true story. I doubt the couple were so glamourous looking and well-heeled, but that’s...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b049n0js The story of Agnessa Murselja (played here by Olivia Popica) a fifteen-year old refugee and pupil at Drumchapel High School that was taken with her family to be deported, in a dawn raid, and returned home to Kosovo. At home whisperings of fields unsown/ Maybe the kind old sun will know. Home is the key word here. The Home Office suggest her home was somewhere else. The Glasgow Girls, as the name suggests...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0499fb1/alan-hansen-player-and-pundit On the eve of the World Cup finals this is a hagiography of a football player and pundit. The latter is easy to deal with. He talks shite for a living. There wasn’t an aha moment. He’d been offered the Liverpool manager’s job after his mate Kenny Dalglish had left and he didn’t take it. With a wife and two kids, he contacted Sky(BSport) about commentary work and ‘fell...

I didn’t mean to read this book. It was a bit like having a wank, not unpleasant but plodding on and on. Harry Beck, one of the protagonists, is a writer. I’ve nothing against writers. I hold McIlvanney’s book Docherty with great affection. I remember it as a tale of a little man that is a big man, a miner that lives by his own rules. If you asked me anything else about it I’d be found out as a charlatan. The Big Man, well, that was a step down...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b049bcfb Motor City Detroit no longer has motors and has lost much of its manufacturing base. About a third of its building lie empty, about 70 000 abandoned lots, many of them burned out. An estimated 20 000 homeless try to find somewhere to sleep in one of the coldest winters on record. Just when they thought things couldn’t get any worse Stacey Dooley is parachuted in to investigate. She immediately hits it off...

Jimmy McGovern has got his own production company. Anything he produces is snapped up and given prime billing by BBC 1. So when he rallies against the law of joint entreprise, McGovern doesn’t write to Parliament about it. He creates a drama. What can we expect? Strong women characters and weak men. Long pauses and melancholic trumpet solos and tunes. Working class lads that get shafted when they do the wrong thing and then shafted again when...