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 … read more
A Second Chance – The Moment That Changed My Life (an edited version of this article appeared in The Guardian – November 17, 2021)
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 … read more
John, Me and the Lancashire Treasure (Sunday Times, April 1980)
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 … read more
Conned by the Lebanese Loop (Daily Mail 8.9.2021)
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 … read more
The Beatles Get Back Revised (October 2, 2021)
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 … read more
The Everly Brothers Hits – Radio Times, December 1982
When the Everly Brothers had their first hits in the late 50s they were both barely more than boys, and the sound of those two late adolescents harmonising about sorrow, pain and the hurts of teenage love, was imprinted on … read more
My Back Pages (An edited version of this article appeared in The Oldie, December. 2021)
What Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Lord Hailsham, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, Roger Vadim, Michael Caine, Leonard Cheshire, Paul Raymond, Eric Morecambe, Mick Jagger, Terry Wogan, Elvis Presley, Dennis Hopper, David Attenborough, Tony Benn, Charlie Watts, Enoch Powell, Marc Bolan and … read more
DEVOTED – ‘drama download of the week’ on BBC Sounds
Covid and Me on ITN
My Covid Summer
First published in the Daily Mail 13.10.2020.
From the very beginning I was afraid of Covid 19. That was in January when I first began to read reports of deaths in China. If that ever reaches the UK I’ll do … read more
