Sandra Harris Writes

  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...

  HE SHOOTS… HE SCORES!!! ANOTHER ACE-IN-THE-HOLE FOR CR7. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, Jaysis, Ireland, what are yiz like? Losing at football again. Last night, we lost to Portugal in a World Cup qualifier. Two-one. But all our pundits said that that was the best we’d been at losing in ages, so it’s all G. Meaning, we’re edging ever closer to, maybe, someday, actually nearly winning a game, or, at least, losing so well that it’s almost the same as winning. That’s hilarious and so typically Irish. We sometimes beat really piddly teams like, say, the Faroe Islands or Gibraltar, where the footballers’ main job is not footy at all but farming or bee-keeping or being a fisherman or something. Then we act all big and important for a bit but put us up against virtually any country with a decent team and we fall apart. Remember Italia ’90, our proudest footy moment ever? The song clearly said that we were going to ‘inflict our game’ on the opponents, and how many goals did we score? Two. Two? ...