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...

  PHILLIP SCHOFIELD, THIS MORNING AND THAT WHOLE KETTLE OF FISH. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Things are not exactly tickety-boo for former ITV presenter Phillip Schofield at the moment. In fact, May has really been the month from hell for the silver-haired sixty-one-year-old who has spent the last twenty years presenting ITV’s flagship television show, THIS MORNING. Firstly, his relationship with his THIS MORNING co-host Holly Willoughby was reported in the media as being ‘on the rocks,’ even though she’d supposedly been his Numero Uno support after he ‘came out’ as gay on the programme in 2020, after twenty-seven years of marriage.   Then, after weeks of intensifying rumours and speculation, Schofield steps down from his THIS MORNING presenting role, followed a few days later by his statement admitting to his affair with ‘a younger male colleague,’ as a result of which he’s stepping down from ITV permanently. He won’t present the upcoming British Soap Awards, and I presume th...

NOTES ON A EUROVISION. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This year’s Eurovision, held in Liverpool, England, was the best craic ever. Hang on a minute. Why was it held in Liverpool? England didn’t win last year’s show, did they? Christ, no, they came second, with Sam Ryder’s song, SPACEMAN , an achievement which is amazing enough considering England haven’t won a sausage in this competition in donkeys’ years. Not since Brexit made them the most annoying country in the EU anyway. Yikes, I mean, not in the EU. No, see, what happened was, Ukraine actually won the entire shebang last year with the Kalush Orchestra and their mesmerising song Stefania, but Ukraine is heavily involved at the moment in a war with Russia (Russia started it!) and would have been unable to host the return show. Hence, England, as the runner-up, graciously stepped in. And if you think, by the way, that Ukraine only won last year’s shindig because they were being bullied big-time by Russia, well, you can think again. Nor...

CORONATION STREET . . . FINALLY! BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Oh wow. It’s done. The crown is on the head. Charles, formerly the Prince of Wales, has just been crowned the King of England. It’s a gig he’s waited for his whole life, but Mumsie, Queen Elizabeth the Second, was a bit of a throne hog and didn’t relinquish that coveted hot seat until she literally passed away in September 2022. I always thought she’d retire in good time, pass the crown onto her first-born and then keep a maternal eye on him for a year or two, see what kind of a fist he made of it, always ready with a golden nugget of maternal wisdom should his steps falter. But no, like I said, Mumsie hogged that throne with the grim determination of my kids elbowing their way into the best couch seats when the good telly starts of a Saturday night. I was watching one of those Sky News phone-in shows during the week, where common folks like you and me were invited on to air their views about Charles and the coronation in con...

  WHY I’M NOT CRAZY ABOUT THIS POST-PANDEMIC WORLD OF OURS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © 1.       Firstly, we emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which a few million people, including many of our loved ones, died globally, into a world where Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was allowed to attack Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Ukraine, in a manner disturbingly similar to Hitler’s take-overs of various countries during World War Two. Didn’t we put measures in place at the end of that war to prevent this exact type of thing from ever happening again in mainland Europe? Someone somewhere must not have read the memo… 2.       Right. The shops are not as full of juicy goodness, useful gizmos and yummy treats as before. And, any time you ask the shop keeper or store manager what’s happened to your favourite chocolate bar with the picture of the lovely Alpine village on the wrapper or the blue kitchen roll that goes on forever, they just look apolog...

  WHEN PETS PASS AWAY… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © You’ll notice I didn’t title this piece COPING WITH THE PASSING OF A PET. I could no more tell you how to do that than I could advise you on stocks and shares. I can’t even bring myself to use the ‘D’ word in reference to the demise of a pet. It’s a topic I find very emotional, so I figured maybe it was time I wrote about it and tried to make sense of it. My kids and I kept hamsters from October 2017 to   October 2022. During this time, we constantly had hamsters living with us in the house. The Last Ham passed away in October 2022, leaving us pet-less for the first time in five years. This was a horrible shock to the system, I can tell you. My daughter told us- my son and I- that she didn’t feel able to care for any more pets for a while, certainly that side of Christmas. As she’s the one who typically does all the grunt work for the little critters, we had to respect this. We were all devastated, though. A Christmas withou...