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A convivial lunch & a clearance

Monday  took place my regular Xmas lunch with two brothers took place in English’s. This lunch first began in the late 1970s and only Covid prevented its annual occurrence last year. Since its inception two of us have retired and two divorced and remarried, whilst I remain outside the conjugal [...]

May 26, 2021 // 0 Comments

Hell Drivers (1957)

I came across this film listening to Doten Adenbayoh’s Up All Night radio programme. A film buff called in to recommend this film which I duly acquired on DVD. It is the story of short-haul road haulage drivers. Stanley Baker (Tom), lately out of prison, takes a job in a corrupt road haulage [...]

May 17, 2021 // 0 Comments

What’s worth keeping (and what isn’t)

In recent times I’ve had the opportunity to re-evaluate my past personal history with some fascinating results. Nearly thirty years ago now my first wife died of cancer and – for a change of scenery – my kids, then quite young, and I moved some seven miles as the crow flies to a new home in [...]

May 9, 2021 // 0 Comments

All the world’s a stage when you think about it

In common with something like twelve million other Brits, last night I stayed up well past my normal bedtime of 7.30pm in order to watch the seventh and final episode of Series 6 of Jed Mercurio’s highly-successful “police procedural” drama Line Of Duty [BBC1 9.00pm]. I have not long awoken [...]

May 3, 2021 // 0 Comments

A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Family Way (1966)

A Touch of Honey is based on a Shelagh Delaney play which she wrote when just eighteen. It’s set in the industrial landscape of Salford and was the first and acclaimed role of Rita Tushingham as Jo. She is the illegitimate daughter of Helen (Dora Bryan) a flighty woman first introduced as [...]

April 18, 2021 // 0 Comments

This Sporting Life (1963)

The northern kitchen sink celebration continued at the Rosen Multiplex with This Sporting Life which some film historians judge the epitome of the genre, others the end of it. Most agree it was Richard Harris’ best performance as Frank Machin the troubled but brilliant rugby league player. The [...]

April 4, 2021 // 0 Comments

Leslie Howard

My main objection to those who clamour for more gay roles is that it implies that actors cannot do the very thing they do best i.e. assume roles. Many had to act as a way out of their upbringing often quite different to their film image. Sean Connery was no privileged Etonian but an Edinburgh [...]

April 1, 2021 // 0 Comments

A kind of loving (1962)

The latest film festival at the Rosen Multiplex celebrates Northern British Kitchen sink of the early 1960s. The two best known actors are Albert Finney from Salford who made his name in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and had a distinguished career in film and television and Tom Courtenay from [...]

March 27, 2021 // 0 Comments

Get a life, everybody!

Today I’m coming out of the closet – if that is the appropriate phrase – as a curmudgeonly old fascist git. We hear and read plenty these days about how “woke” the modern world has become (or is it just the Millennials, or even our “Generation X” youngsters as a group, that is being [...]

March 24, 2021 // 0 Comments

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