celticman's blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b077r82t/panorama-im-broken-inside-saras-story How many children die whilst in psychiatric care? You probably don’t know. If you were health secretary, you might say something to the effect, none that I know of, or you might guess the answer to be four this year, one of them Sarah Green. You might suggest that the knock on effects of broken Britain (my words) is the number of children seeking psychiatric care...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p03ply8y/chasing-dad-a-lifelong-addiction Chasing Dad, is of course a play on Chasing the Dragon, or in other words, heroin addiction. This is a film about father and son. ‘This is it Phil. This is my life.’ ‘I don’t know who you are.’ But the filmmaker tells those watching. ‘My father’s been addicted to heroin as long as I can remember.’ Later, his dad confirms this. He tells his son, and the camera, he...

This is a difficult script to write. You could go with the no suggestion of impropriety, criminality or wrongdoing, and following good business practice [fill in any name here, for example, David Cameron, Pablo Escobar, Vladimir Putin] You could go all jokey and imply we're all in it together and we’ve all done it, signing on, or someone else signing on for you, for example, Bahama residents including a part-time bishop, because you’re too busy...

Things That Are is the size of a prayer book. And you should have to put on those white gloves snooker referees wear when re-spotting a ball, when opening its pages. It should be treated with reverence and awe, because there is wisdom in these words. It should become a religion with worshipers meeting up to discuss sentence and phrases such as the introduction to ‘Silly Lilies’, 'Most plants bend over backwards to cooperate with reality’. This...

I’ve tackled War and Peace a few times, but beat a hasty retreat. Initially the problem was the characters involved. I’m not the brightest. Easily confused. So having the patronymic and other names tacked on like stags antlers got a bit confusing. On the opening page, for example, we have Anna Pavlovna Scherer and she’s some kind of hanger on to Empress Marya Fedorovo, the Dowager Empress, and the former is at home having a soiree with the Abbe...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0755ms6/janis-joplin-little-girl-blue After the death of Johan Cruyff, I got talking and into one of those arguments about who was better Cruyff or Zinedine Zidane. I said it was close to call, but that Cruyff was just perhaps more elegant. ‘How can you get more elegant than Zidane?’ was the riposte. Fair point. Just my opinion. I’d seen both players in their prime, and love football. I was frequently number...

‘There was people waiting, families waiting to be evacuated…’ ‘I’m not sure how long we were away, although the house was damaged it was habitable…so we were in the back room with the windows boarded up because all the glass in the house was shattered, the blast had blown out all the windows…It was quite cosy. We had to cook on the fire.’ ‘I stood outside the burnt shell of what was my home with my children, all we had was what we stood in… how...

As a story teller, with Leicester City at the top of the Premier League it’s been the year of the underdog, and I’ve been following the Iain Duncan Smith, or the IDS narrative, with interest. He resigned from the Cabinet because ‘I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national interest…[I]...

Alone in Berlin is full of cartoon characters! And exclamation marks! And the third-person omniscient narrator who sees all and feels all, on behalf of his audience, suddenly comes clean about his omnipotent powers and directly addresses the reader and insists on a happy ending! Fuck that! But as we fall back into history and look at Boris Johnson and George Osborne vying with each other to think of new ways to beat the poor down and, on the...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07472y8 This is a programme about domestic violence. Violence against women. It follows Thames Valley’s domestic abuse unit, over a twelve month period, as its police officers go about the business of support Jemma, Helen and Sabrina and gaining a conviction against their attackers. The evidence seems straightforward. Helen’s dad, Russell, puts it this way, ‘I feel gutted. You never know what happens behind...