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ADOLESCENCE. (2025) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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ADOLESCENCE. (2025) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY JACK THORNE AND STEPHEN GRAHAM. DIRECTED BY PHILIP BARANTINI. STARRING STEPHEN GRAHAM, OWEN COOPER, CHRISTINE TREMARCO, ERIN DOHERTY, ASHLEY WALTERS AND FAYE MARSAY. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s about six in the morning and a little housing estate somewhere in England is still slumbering peacefully. Suddenly, a convoy of police cars and vans pull up outside one of the houses. A cohort of masked, heavily armed men dressed in black and toting huge guns emerge from one of the vans and start to break down the front door with a battering ram. The family of four inside are terrified as they are shouted at to stay still or get on the floor. Upstairs, a thirteen-year-old boy who looks much younger is revealed as the reason for this early morning raid. He’s told he’s being arrested on suspicion of murder, though he’s not told of whom and strangely, no-one in his family thinks to ask. It’s a shocking opening to a well-plotted and well-act...
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OUR MAN IN THE WHITEHOUSE...? BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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OUR MAN IN THE WHITEHOUSE…? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Oh dear. Oh dearie dearie me. What a pickle. Members of the Irish government have been frantically clutching their pearls since St. Patrick’s Day when it was revealed to the world that the Irish person being feted in the Whitehouse on that special day was, not the leader of the government, Taoiseach Micheal Martin, but in fact Conor McGregor, MMA fighter and all-round controversial Irish figure. Micheal Martin, after months of worrying that he wouldn’t be invited, was in the Whitehouse for the twelfth, not the seventeenth, of March, and shamed himself for all time by adopting a forelock-tugging, yes-sir-no-sir-three-bags-full-sir attitude to Donald Trump, in case he found himself out on his arse like Volodymyr Zelensky had done a mere couple of weeks before. Yes, President Trump dislikes being disagreed with, but surely he can’t respect a man who’ll crawl on his belly in the dirt to please him, with eyes submissively downcast like...
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COVID-19, FIVE YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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COVID-19, FIVE YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Was it really five years ago today that our government announced the closure of all schools for two weeks because a virus called COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus, had travelled here from China? It was better to be safe than sorry, we were told, little knowing that the two weeks off school would turn into five and a half months and that those months in lockdown would turn out to be some of the strangest and most surreal and bizarre we’d ever experienced as a country.   I remember where I was when the school closures were announced. In a record shop, looking at CDs. I was convinced, I suppose, like many other people, that it would be a storm in a teacup and over before we knew it. Boy, was my face red. The school closure thing turned out to be a blessing in disguise. My son, still coming to terms with an autism diagnosis, wasn’t having an easy time of it in school and the break was a huge relief to both himself and myself....
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AND NOW FOR SANDRA HARRIS'S DIARY... BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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  AND NOW FOR SANDRA HARRIS’S DIARY… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © One of the inescapable things about being a writer is the urge to unburden yourself of your doings, thoughts and feelings on a regular basis to your public, by which I mean the handful of people who might be kind enough to read your blog. Enjoy my free unbosomings pertaining to the month of February of which we are, thankfully, about to take our leave. I hate February, and normally view it with the distaste which one might normally reserve for, say, a persistent itch on the sweaty underside of Satan’s ball-bag, or something equally odious. (And I’m not even gonna mention Valentine’s Day  and the Bridget Jones’s Diary film series coming to an end forever.) For one thing, the weather was diabolical, or Dia-bollock-le, if we keep with the theme of the Devil’s genitals. For about ten days, there wasn’t so much as a ray of sunshine. Now, I normally consider myself a Goth who lives only for the short, dark days of wint...
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'BYE 'BYE, BRIDGET JONES...? BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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  ‘BYE ‘BYE, BRIDGET JONES…? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s always sad when something good ends. It’s even sadder when it’s something like the Bridget Jones’s Diary series of films, based on the books by British author, Helen Fielding. The film series kicked off in the year 2000 with the wonderful BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY , starring the American (odd choice?) actress Renee Zellweger as British thirty-something, Bridget Jones. Bridget’s fed up of being single, of drinking, smoking and eating too much and being less than perfect overall. She buys a new diary to document her attempt to attain perfection and a zen-like state of calm contentedness in everything. The problem is that Bridget is endearingly funny, one hundred percent human and as far from perfect as you can get, which is why people love her. She’s a lovable mess, rather than a prim and proper Little Miss Perfect type, which would be unbearable. No-one likes a po-faced saint, lol. Her adventures as she goes in search of her ...
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WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW, IS LOVE, SWEET LOVE... BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW, IS LOVE, SWEET LOVE... BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Well, another Valentine’s Day is here and yet another postman is laid up in bed, possibly for days if not weeks, after humping all my cards, flowers, boxes of chocolates and other tokens and tributes of love and esteem to my front door from the postal van. The poor fella. I must remember to write him a card and drop it round to his house later. If it’s anything like last year, however, I expect his distraught wife will come to the front door and cry buckets about how Harry- that’s his name, Harry- won’t be able to work for weeks with his ruined back thanks to my post-load and what are they supposed to live on and how do I live with myself knowing that my beauty, charm, intelligence and sex appeal has broken yet another poor postman who, after all, was only doing his job…? It can get very trying, being so charismatic and sexually irresistible all the time. It’s not like how you guys think it is. It’s really not...
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THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW: FIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION...! BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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  JERRY SPRINGER: FIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION! BY SANDRA HARRIS. © ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry…!’ I remember one time late in the ‘Nineties, my then boyfriend said to me: ‘You’ll never believe what I saw on television last night. It was this American talk show, right, but the guests were knocking seven bells out of each other and the audience members were going wild, meanwhile, the host was just standing there grinning and letting it all happen…! You have to watch this with me when it’s on again!’ And of course I did, and of course the programme was the Jerry Springer Show, and the laid-back host who fiddled while Rome burned was the eponymous Jerry Springer, the man who more or less single-handedly invented what we now call ‘trash TV.’ This was TV that concentrated on the more controversial or sensationalist topics out there rather than the boring or sensible ones, and, from 1991 to 2018, Jerry Springer was the undisputed king of trash TV. The guests were often of the ‘poor w...
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