Sandra Harris Writes

LOVIN’ LOVE ISLAND: MY GUILTY PLEASURE. (2015- THE PRESENT DAY) ORIGINAL TELEVISION NETWORK: ITV2. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Well, I can’t be highbrow all the time, can I, watching subtitled black-and-white Eastern European films about the meaning of life and death? Sometimes, even an intellectual like myself likes to kick back of an evening and watch a bunch of girls falling out of their bikinis in an effort to attract the attention of a group of (mainly) dunder-headed blokes with washboard abs. I’ve only started watching it properly this summer, but I’m as hooked as a fish on a… well, on a hook, I guess. What’s it all about, anyway, Dougal? Well, Ted, it doesn’t really have a story as such, it’s just about football and that. Oh, you mean, what’s Love Island all about? Well, you see, Ted, it’s like this… It’s basically a British game-show about romance and dating, right, the only kind of game-show I could physically tolerate. It’s been going on for a few years now and it has somethi...

  REMEMBERING MT-USA AND VINCENT ‘FAB VINNIE’ HANLEY. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © MT-USA was a fuppin’ musical-television sensation that we Irish hugely appreciated, because back in the early-to-mid 1980s, also known as the Dark Ages, we only had two television channels, RTE ONE and RTE (can you guess it?) TWO (haha, well done, lol) , and our only musical-television programme was TOP OF THE POPS, which aired for half an hour every Thursday night. Not that I didn’t live for that one precious half hour a week, I did, I totally did. Knowing the Number One chart single for the week was as important to me as, well, as something really, really important, if you get me, and I genuinely probably would’ve stopped breathing if they’d taken it off the air for some reason. But, in 1984, a phenomenon occurred. Mt-USA, or Music-Television USA, its slogan being ‘Music Never Looked Better.’ And it never did! Three hours of a television show on a Sunday afternoon, from two in the afternoon till abo...