I SPOTTED this in the Sunday Tribune today...
I caught this last night when LUCY KENNEDY not Davina McCall stayed with Samantha Mumba and it was fairly good. A couple of weeks ago I saw her with Senator David Norris and they were filming for this so I'll be sure to try to catch that one. Anyway that the typo of the day so far.
I CAN'T believe it has been ten years since the Good Friday Agreement. It took so long so to get that stage let alone how far things have come along since. I would have never imagined that I would Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness sitting side by side sharing a joke. None of this was ever going to be easily-got or quickly attained, but does that matter as long as things are moving forward.
Like many others I grew up in Belfast having known nothing else, the things that we lived through were normal everyday life. I remember an incident in school where a bomb went off in town and our teacher made us say a prayer in case of casualties before bursting into tears about how sad it was for us being born in 1970 and not knowing what it was like to live in Belfast without all this going on. At the time we were embarrassed for her and joked about it later but if I am honest her words have stuck with me to this day.
I should at some stage write down all the things I remember, a pal and I would always say that we would have loved to have kept succinct diaries of those times. Judging by the diaries I remember keeping it would have read like a normal teens and probably wouldn't really provide a true snapshot with entries such as 'I really fancy (insert as appropriate) we met walking home from school after the buses were off because of a riot'. Still and all I suppose it still paints a picture.
I do have some pics I took in the run up to the Good Friday Agreement which I should dig out at some stage and put up. One other thing I should point you to is the UTV programme The Troubles I've Seen, it is finished now (but some clips are available at the previous link) and was fascinating for me to see places I know from being a child, streets that while still there look different now. It is also interesting to see how reporters like Trevor McDonald and Kate Adie remember covering northern Ireland.
I forgot that Sir Trevor covered the North and it must have been mad for him to see people's reactions to a black reporter, like the rest of the country there were very few black people living in Belfast. He told a funny story in one of the shows where he recalls talking to a man on the Shankill saying he was in a mixed marriage and the man replied 'you married a Catholic' to Trevor's amusement. "No I married a white woman." Priceless.
Kate Adie also told a story where during one riot she was lying facedown on the ground as things went off all around her. She ended up falling over a hedge and was lying in a garden with her legs in the air looking up at the sky when a window above her opened. A wee woman stuck her head out the window, looked at her, before asking her did she want a cup of tea.
Anyway regardless of people's perceptions or misconceptions, I love Belfast and I love the people and I wouldn't have wanted to grow up anywhere else. Sure hasn't it shaped who I am. I am thrilled that we are where we are now. So here's looking forward to what the next 10 years has to bring.
RM column November 23rd - Left holding the baby
REALITY TV is about all you can see on the box these days and while I am fed up to the back teeth of it all there’s a programme coming that I will be watching as well as insisting the Young Wan watch too.
It is a British show and will follow a gang of teenagers as they are put into a family situation with themselves as the parents and we get to watch how they get on.
Considering that the UK has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in western Europe there can be no better method of contraception than to place a gang of teens in the harshest parenting situation dealing with everything that being a parent throws at you.
Two of the strongest arguments against having children so young is that nearly a third of teenagers mothers in Britain are living alone with their baby a year after birth and children born to teen mothers are at a greater risk of living in poverty. These are British statistics but we know the apply here as much as over there.
We have seen many different attempts to show our young people just how hard it is to cope with a child when you are little more than a child yourself, from the dolls that cry unless they are being well-taken care of and even when they are not. But at the end of the day it is still a doll and not a live-screaming-gurgling and nappy-filling bundle of joy.
This show will start with a number of young couples aged between 16 and 19 years old. They will be living in a house together, given jobs and will get to experience pregnancy with an ‘empathy belly’. During that time they will have to attend ante-natal classes before being presented with a real live baby.
The babies will then be replaced with toddlers, the toddlers will then be replaced with pre-teens and of course family pets will also feature. As if that isn’t enough for them to cope with the teen couples’ young families will then ‘become’ teenagers before the elderly and infirm grandparents move in.
What a wonderful dose of reality these teenagers will get. No only should they be put off having children before they are ready, and hopefully not forever, but they will eventually have to deal with a version of themselves when their ‘babies’ become teens; stroppy, cheeky and hard-to-live with younger versions of themselves.
All this will take over what will probably be the longest month in these teenagers’ lives and should make for riveting viewing.
Sleepless nights will probably be the least of these kids’ worries, they will be told in leg-crossing eye-watering details of what can happen during birth, they will have to cope with caring for a young baby never mind have an insight into what their own parents deal with when the babies ‘grow’ into teenagers with a mind and mouth of their own.
Letting teenagers play house with your child is one thing (are the real parents mad?) and that aside this is a wonderful social experiment and it makes me wonder how many of the young couples remained couples at the end of it all.
I also wonder if in the coming years how many if any will become teenage parents in the future. Hopefully the show will prove to be a wonderful deterrent; in fact I would even go so far as to say this should become an obligatory subject for both our boys and girls in school.
There is no point whatsoever in this being an issue for girls alone. While we know often girls are left holding the baby, until we teach our boys responsibility too, we are just banging our heads off a brick wall never mind teaching our boys the worst possible lessons in responsibility or should that read irresponsibility.
Parenthood is wonderful, tough but wonderful but it is something that should never be viewed lightly or walked into blindly. I’ll be interested to see what the kids think themselves at the end of it all.
The show will be aired on BBC3 so I’ll have to wait for it to be broadcast on the non-digital channels but it is definitely one to watch.
THE Young Wan on Jerry Springer: "that show is for people with no lives 'we have big problems so lets get naked'".
He he.
I just happened to be flicking around the channels and came across BBC1's Movie Connections programmes that brought back some memories.
The Commitments was first released when I moved to Dublin and it is one of the first things I remember doing on a night on, going to see the movie. At the time it was playing in cinemas around the clock. I remember having a press release for the movie at the time, all swish and even with a Dublin to English translator. Well I used to have it, but God knows where it has disappeared to over the time since.
When I went to see the movie I remember sitting behind this gang of giggling girls who annoyed me no end, eh no change there then but I remember the pride around the film. This was more than cool cos I was a newly-adopted Dub, well a blow-in but sure.
The thrill the movie brought to the city was huge, the pride immense and it is a cool memory for me particularly given the fact I was from Belfast and anything made there had us locked in the 1970s with awful clothes and awful story lines. But hey I'm not knocking anything I have always loved something set in Belfast, even if it is to tear it apart because it isn't realistic.
Anyway The Commitments, what a great movie. The programme explored the casting, quite a brave and wonderful move/s (going with mostly unknowns) among lots of other things, so if you get a chance to catch it again do watch it. Wonderful altogether.
Simon won the Apprentice. Poo. Kristina I think you were the best, hands down.
You may remember Susan Jocelyn Bell from my Great Irish Women series. A hugely lauded and accomplished scientist, Susan discovered pulsars when she was only 24 years old.
Well BB1 Northern Ireland is showing a programme about her this evening, sorry I meant to blog about it before now, at 10:45pm 'Northern Star'.
Astrophysicist Susan will talk about the impact of her massive discovery, being a woman in the science field and more I am sure.
Now the real question is whether or not Nanny will allow me to watch the show. Seriously I have to fight over the remote control. But seeing as how the apprentice is on shortly and she LOVES the show, as do I now thanks to herself and Tetra, so maybe I will get to watch about our own Nobel Prize winner.
Okay okay she didn't win the prize but it was her discovery that won the prize and that is as good as in my book.
Oh and I hope Kristina wins The Apprentice. I thought that other eejit woman, Katie, was an absolute talker with no substance whatsoever. 'Global Brand Consultant', yeah yeah, for the Met Office. How does that work? That title to me reeks of 'Refuse Technician' for 'Bin Collector' to me. The guy Simon inspires nothing in me, I thought he was sh*te, all talk again with crazy ideas, likeable though.
Anyway do check out Northern Star on BBC1 at 10:45pm. Right I'm off to watch the Apprentice.
The green writing on the pic apparently says volume...
Never let Nanny near the remote. Nuff said.
"My name is Red Mum and I am addicted to America's Next Top Model." There I have admitted it for all to see.
The Young Wan is also addicted, she was practically clapping her hands with glee when it came on this evening, for the last time in this current series. By the way is it terrible to bring herself down with me in my admission? Ah who cares, one down, all down. Hey sure even Nanny loves it and as she is visiting friends tonight I had to record it for her.
The fact that it is repeated continuously on Living TV which broadcasts the show, wasn't enough, Nanny wanted it recorded. So we have.
We all love it. For me, I love the photo shoots, I LOVE seeing the images from the photo shoots. I love looking at the lighting, working out the lighting, it is just addictive. The added nastiness and craic is just plain icing on the cake.
The fact that a pal from Flickr has had photographs featured on the show, something I learned a while after I met, was pure excitement. Do check out her/Mymsie's pics on Flickr, they are amazing and tell her I said hello. She also has a website too.
Can you imagine me watching the programme and squealing with excitement telling my pal Mar (who was watching the show under duress) 'that's Mymsie's pics'. It was more than cool to see pics I know from Flickr on a show I also love. Here's some more.
And now the current series being shown here is over and Cari-Dee won (yippeeee from our household - we didn't want Melrose to win - I know I know I am sad).
What are they going to show next week, it better be the next season. Seriously it better be. I have had enough mourning over the end of Life on Mars.
Though I loved the ending, what is so wrong with Happy Endings. One of the worst endings in the world was for Thelma and Louise.
And yes I know I should love it, two women deciding their own destiny, but they died. They died...
I wanted a deus ex machina to sort it out, was that too much to ask? That's what I loved about Life on Mars, aside from the lovely Simms, it had the fantastical wonderful happy ending, perfect. That's me happy.
Now could someone go back and sort out a happy ending to Thelma and Louise, and also bring back the next series of America's Next Top Model? Please.
Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs flickr
ON the whole the telly was seriously sh*te over the Christmas break but I did enjoy 'It all started with Swap Shop' which was on over the last couple of days a programme which we watched religiously in our house every Saturday in the 1970s.
Swap Shop is one of the programmes which gets a mention when people talk about their favourite childhood shows like Top of the Pops on a Thursday night, or Bagpuss or whatever.
I have made the mistake of talking to friends from down the country about Swap Shop only to get this puritanical mantra 'we only had RTE in our house'. Oohhh sorry.
Well in our house we did have BBC and ITV and in the early 1980s we got an RTE aerial, I think by that stage I had either stopped watching Swap Shop or it had finished.
My Daddy was the double of Swap Shop presenter Noel Edmonds and people would tell him that all the time. I remember a neighbour saying to me when I was about seven that I was very lucky to have Noel Edmonds for a Daddy and I remember thinking 'what an eejit'.
Given the splurge of kid's television, much of which is quality, it is mad to think there was a time when kids were not catered for in the way they are now.
I remember Saturday mornings (just about) before Swap Shop when the vast majority of kid's programming involved half hour dramas from Eastern Europe which were badly dubbed and involved kids going around solving mysteries and the like. Then there were the old favourites like Champion the Wonder horse or The Flashing Blade.
Course it was RTE that broadcast the magical HRPufNStuff.
So for all of you who liked Swap Shop too here are some outtakes. In fairness they aren't that hilarious, but sure.
Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs swap shop Noel Edmonds television
