Sandra Harris Writes

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...

  A TOXIC CULTURE IN FOOTBALL: A WOMAN SPEAKS OUT. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Okay, okay, I’m not a man. I don’t have a willy and balls, I have the other thing. But I’m the mother of a young man, so I think that might just give me the right to talk about one of the things normally seen as a mostly male preserve: football. Yes, in the past couple of years, women’s football has suddenly become a big thing and women are gaining recognition left, right and centre for it and other sports. There are female pundits on the television now and I think even women referees in actual football games where men are playing. Fair play to them all, especially the referees, because that would be scary, being the only woman on a field full of angry, sweaty men all barging into one another while you're trying to make note of who’s fouling whom, but don’t tell me that men don’t secretly still consider football to be their own personal stronghold and that ‘birds’ have no place in it. I’ve talked befor...