Rosie (2021) BBC3, BBCiPlayer, Script by Roddie Doyle, Director Paddy Breathnach. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09lk76z/rosie Roddy Doyle makes you smile. You just need to think of that line from The Commitments , ‘We are the black men of…’ whatever it was. I’m never that grand at remembering. He wrote about the housing crisis in Dublin. But they can’t be that bad that Conor McGregor threatens to lead a posse of Irishmen to deal with...

Poets, get those manuscripts ready.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001sg02/words-on-bathroom-walls https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001sg02#credits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_on_Bathroom_Walls Words on Bathroom Walls was a 2020 release and mainstream movie. It had a budget of over $9 million. Yet it only took around a third of that at the Box Office. If it looks like a turkey and sounds like a turkey… But it’d be a mistake to think that. Some movies like Pretty...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/ben-hur-2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Hur_(2016_film) I was flicking through the channels. I couldn’t understand why they were putting Ben-Hur on in a premium time slot. I’d fond memories of Ben-Hur, being generally a sucker for Biblical epics when I was a kid in the La Scala. The type where Jesus’s shadow touches Victor Mature’s face in The Robe . I can’t really remember what happened next. No doubt...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001swt5/three-faces https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001swt5#credits This is one of those films I watched which I didn’t really enjoy. For some reason I believed it would be cartoonish. I was thinking of something or somebody else. But it was a conventional film. I’m not sure certain why it was called Three Faces? Perhaps three faces of Iran (I’m not sure what they are either). I’ll do what I usually do...

https://heyzine.com/flip-book/84d0324158.html?fbclid=IwAR3dWB7JCVQnTbz9L... One week to go! Normally, I wouldn't post anything about an author event, but this appearance, flying in from Dublin to this event is literally three years in the making. I met the festival director, Dr Jacky Collins in 2019 at the Bloody Scotland Festival in Stirling. I was part of the final group of authors selected to pitch to a panel of editors and industry...

As today (1st December) marks the start of the official countdown to Christmas, I'm making my Christmas book (Kindle version), 'A Christmas Cracker' FREE for one day only. Apart from an alternative version of the Nativity and a wry take on those 'round robin' Christmas cards we all get, you'll also find some tales of my Christmas Past and the first ever Josiah and Archibald Christmas story. Grab it while you can, ho, ho, ho! https://getbook.at/...

As always, some wonderful writing on the site this week, a very welcome antidote to the winter weather. Story of the Week is Simon Barget's 'Us and Them'. There's a lot of snappy answers being offered to things going on in the world at the moment, but this piece offers thoughts on the heartbreaking complexity, nuances and stumbling humanity of it all. The deep sadness of the final paragraph stayed with me for a long time. Thanks to Simon for...

Write what you know. Megan Nolan writes about Waterford, where she was brought up. And London where she moved to. But it’s London 1990. Nolan would be a toddler. A child has been reported missing and later found dead. ‘Down below in Skyler Square the trouble was passing quickly from door to door, mothers telling mothers, not speaking aloud but somehow saying : baby gone, bad man, wild animal. ’ James Bulger 1993 is the classic case. But google...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/utama/on-demand/75755-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utama Virgino (José Calcina) gets up early to tend his llamas in Altiplano, the arid high plateau of the Andes with its mixture of cold and heat. His wife Sisa (Luisa Quispe) takes two metal buckets and walks into town for water. But the annual monsoon didn’t come. It hasn’t rained for a year. The weather is sick, says one of the villagers. Virgino is...