celticman's blog

It’s been thirty years since I watched The Breakfast Club. I truanted from real life and took a step back into Shermar High school where it’s always Saturday detention in 1984. The Simple Minds hold play with a number one both sides of the Atlantic, Don’t You Forget About Me? The only thing I could remember about the original was Molly Ringwald and one of the other detainees admitted they didn’t need to be in detention but they’d nowhere else to...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b063lywk/imagine-summer-2015-5-rich... I didn’t know it but I like Richard Flanagan, even though I’ve not read any of his books. Grandson of illiterates and descended from criminals transported to Tasmania, his father revered books but to be an author was not something he expected. A drowning accident in which he seemed to understand for a moment the interconnectedness of all things changed that. He continued...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b063f57q/dont-take-my-baby This drama comes with lots of baggage. Around 3000 children are removed from disabled people every year. Writer Jack Thorne has distilled their voice and created composite characters that let them speak. Tom (played by Adam Long) is partially sighted. He is full- time carer and lover of Anna (Ruth Madley). She has a muscle wasting disease and every two years is told by specialist...

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "Finite Creatures." It’s front page news in the Observer , Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II giving a Nazi salute. Pages of piffle devoted to it. What is Her Royal Highness hiding in the royal wardrobe, an SS guard’s uniform? I’d say give her a little slack. She was a kid. Kids do stupid things. I’ve done it myself. Well not that exactly. But on Friday night I watched a programme on Channel 5,...

Jon McGregor (2013) This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You. Jon McGregor winds his way across a mythical country, it might even be England, from Horncastle in the first story ‘That Colour’ to Marshchapel in ‘I’ll Buy You A Shovel’ in this collection of thirty short stories. ‘Sharp, dark and hugely entertaining’ says the blurb on the cover, a quote from Observer. ‘Haunting and brilliant’ Independent. I’m underwhelmed. Take...

I’d a vague notion of who Alan Johnson was. I read this book because I wanted to chart his journey from ordinary working-class bloke—when the book begins, ‘a seventeen-year old shelf stacker at Anthony Jackson’s supermarket on the Upper Richmond Road in East Sheen’— to becoming an MP in the Conservative government under Thatcher, or John Major. I couldn’t remember which Prime minister it was. Alan Johnson became a Labour MP and severed in the...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02tc97z/cordon-episode-1 I’m a bit of a cultural snob. I loved Wallander . Then The Killing . And I’d a brief fling with 1874 . Now I’ve gone all Flemish and I’m six episodes into Cordon . It’s a very simple premise: what if a disease as contagious as Ebola arrived in a city like Antwerp and the authorities decided to seal off that zone for 48 hours. Then that time frame is extended. Those inside the cordon...

Labour should drop the drawbridge between Oxbridge and the House of Commons and allow its putative MPs to mingle with the common herd. The thaumaturgic touch may heal the collective illusion of knowing what they’re doing. The third world war has begun – it’s called global warning. Labour should stop the Panda watch at Edinburgh zoo which costs hundreds of thousands of pounds and subsidises the Chinese economy. We should import polar bears. A...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b061vbdj/children-of-the-gaza-war Yet another war in Gaza. The third war in six years. Hamas has been sending rockets into Israel. Killing indiscriminately. Israel invades, but it’s a mismatch. It’s not street to street fighting. Israel controls the sky and coastline. They have the latest technology and are fearful of picking up troop casualties and the backlash which would entail. Overwhelming force. War by...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b061c786/a-song-for-jenny This is a drama about a mother’s grief. Twenty-four-year- old Jenny (Nicola Wren) brought alive in flashbacks was blown up in an underground train on 7 th July 2005, ten years today, passing through Edgware Road tube station whilst reading C.S.Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew . We don’t know this, but since she was always reading, sent her mum Julie (Emily Watson) an email telling her...