Half a century ago Yoko Ono was probably the most vilified woman in the world. Believed by many to have been responsible for the break-up of the Beatles, she had, it was thought, ruined everything. Who does she think she is, was a widespread attitude, and not only among Beatles fans. This strange, zany, Japanese,… Continue reading…
No-one sets out to write a film that half a century later is considered a cult movie. But I did, by accident, when, in 1972, I wrote a film called That’ll Be The Day. Then I watched it go from being a story about a sixth form boy, his first sex in a holiday camp,… Continue reading…
More than almost any other artists, songwriters define their moments. Burt Bacharach was such a songwriter. His most prolific period being from the early-Sixties right through the Seventies when the hits just poured out of him and his song-writing partner, the late Hal David. That time is mainly remembered for the Beatles and Rolling Stones,… Continue reading…
Half a century ago Yoko Ono was probably the most vilified woman in the world. Believed by many to have been responsible for the break-up of the Beatles, she had, it was thought, ruined everything. Who does she think she is, was a widespread attitude, and not only among Beatles fans. This strange, zany, Japanese,… Continue reading…
Who killed Elvis Presley? In his new film ‘Elvis’, which goes on release this week, writer-director Baz Luhrmann makes a pretty convincing argument that the singer’s manager, the phony ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, bears much of the responsibility for the star’s early death. Many fans will agree with that, believing that, during those last months of… Continue reading…
You can’t beat a bit of real mystery as the background for dramatic super-reality, can you? Well, that’s what the latest Doctor Who series tapped into when the Tardis touched down in Liverpool on Sunday evening. Not being a time traveller myself, I can’t say that I completely followed the plot. But the bit that… Continue reading…
A second chance – that’s what I was being given when, having skirted death during that first round of Covid, I left hospital just over a year ago. I was, I was told, only half way there. It would take twelve more months before my body got back to near where it had been before… Continue reading…
I learned the real meaning of gold fever when I was 13 – although in my case the fever was silver and came in the shape of 33 Roman coins dug out of the bed of a small stream on a West Lancashire farm. A chance remark by a friend of my sister’s about a hoard of… Continue reading…
We got conned a couple of weeks ago – as, according to Action Fraud, were 504,489 other people during the past 13 months. That’s right. Nearly half a million people in the UK have had money stolen from them in little over a year by gangs of fraudsters – to the tune of £1.26 billion… Continue reading…
The Beatles were hardly a happy band of musical brothers when they assembled before film cameras shortly after ten in Twickenham Film Studios on the morning of January 2, 1969. It was too early in the day for John and George, too cold as well, and it was only ten weeks since they’d finished their… Continue reading…
