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Mid-life crisis is the theme for Jean Becker’s whimsical 2012 film Bienvenue Parmi Nous aka Welcome Aboard. Tracing the breakdown and rehabilitation of a talented artist unable any longer to paint, this is very much the type of film to file under the heading ‘heart-warming.’ On the surface irascible Monsieur Tailander (Patrick Chesnais) has all a man could want i.e. a beautiful wife, loving family and a comfortable home. But it’s not enough. For reasons the audience is not pr

The death of Helen Smith has been shrouded in controversy ever since the 23-year-old nurse allegedly fell from a sixth-floor balcony in Jeddah. Had she fallen? Or had she been pushed? Even more mysterious was the fact she had supposedly fallen to her death together with a Dutch skipper whom she had only just met at a party at the same apartment. To this day, the events of that fateful night in 1979 remain unknown. Writing in 1983, with the co-operation of the dead woman’s fat

Got to confess I’m not a fan of sci-fi novels. Movies, maybe – but novels . . . Along with westerns, chick-lit and Fantasy/Magic Realism it’s a genre that does nothing for me. With Sci-fi (and fantasy) it’s imperative the writer creates a world to believe in. Why go to all that trouble? For me a novel succeeds or fails primarily in one area only: character. The best drama for my money always occurs not in faraway galaxies but in and around the kitchen sink. But that’s just me

Not for nothing did authors Derek Humphry and David Tindall choose ‘False Messiah’ as the title for their book about the remarkable life of the individual who called himself ‘Michael X.’ As book titles go it’s a choice as apt as they come. For the character portrayed within these pages indeed comes across as a Svengali, a man who promised much but delivered very little - apart, that is, from misery and suffering to all who landed in his orbit. Born Michael de Freitas in 1933,

The murder of an 11-year-old girl in a quiet French village is the backdrop to Bruno Dumont’s film L'humanité (Humanity). But this is not your average detective flick – far from it. For this is a film which takes as its subject the emotional retardation of its main character, police inspector Pharaon De Winter played by Emmanuel Schotté. It transpires that Pharaon has himself not only lost a daughter but a wife too. Whichever way he ‘lost’ his family – and it is never reveale

Knole House in Sevenoaks is arguably Britain’s greatest private house. Home to the same family for thirteen generations, Robert Sackville-West, the author of The Disinherited is himself the latest line of this famous family to inhabit a house that at one time reputedly had 365 rooms and in whose commodious surroundings kings and queens would happily lay their heads. The house itself, replete with its own lake, has featured in films such as The Other Boelyn Girl, Sherlock Holm

Much of what David Skelton advocates to 'fix' an ailing and dispirited UK in his recently published tract The New Snobbery is indisputable common sense: more investment in further education; emergence of local banks to serve local communities; reindustrialisation of the UK economy and with it the return of dignified and secure employment for working class communities; greater representation of working people in the institutions (especially cultural) as well as the entire gove

We’ve all been there haven’t we? Whoosh! The toilet flushes….and er well let’s just say that it doesn’t quite do its job (no pun intended) and instead of leaving a gleaming, empty toilet pan we are left with…a backlog (Doh!). Toilets, like computers are great when they work, and when they don’t work, pains in the…..well you know what I mean. I’m not the world’s greatest D-I-Y-er, far from it. For one terrifying moment I stood rooted to the spot, watching the water level in my

Brad Pitt’s latest film sees the Hollywood heartthrob doing something quite novel: parleying fluent Francais for large chunks of the movie. Once the shock is gotten over and assuming the (white) sub-titles are legible on your Telly, Allied turns out to be a fairly enjoyable caper. Parachuted into Morocco on a secret mission, Max Vattan is a World War II special agent who speaks French with a thick Canadian accent. Using the cover afforded by his ‘wife’ French resistance fight

It all starts off intriguingly enough: woman is mugged of handbag; man finds discarded purse and personal papers and in typically male fashion wonders if he can possibly engineer a romantic meeting with the victim Mme Muir (Sabine Azeima) So far so good. And then it all goes a bit pear-shaped really. In fact, the longer it goes on, the more rotten this film becomes until it starts to reek of foul and loathsome things. What the heck happened here? The trouble is the leading ma

Sir John Mortimer is perhaps best know for creating one of literature's most irrascible yet loveable characters in Horace Rumpole. The Thames television adaptation of the novels - Rumpole of the Bailey - proved hugely successful in the 1980's. But as I have been discovering ever since, Rumpole is just the tip of a very huge iceberg. Although still regarded primarily as a screenwriter, barrister, dramatist and raconteur par excellence, Mortimer, to my mind is also one of the f

A cynic, wrote Oscar Wilde knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It wasn’t that long ago – a little under twelve months to be precise – that Liverpool City Council were proposing to close down 11 of the city’s public libraries. Unsurprisingly, there was uproar. While the great and good of our city council remained impervious to the enormous value of public libraries, the people who actually use these services - deriving a whole host of benefits from them - w

The death of Cilla Black in Spain a few days ago has brought forth a wave of sympathy from the TV personality’s many fans as well as from her many show business colleagues. The former host of ITV’s hugely popular 80’s dating show Blind Date was known affectionately as ‘our’ Cilla, a tag which neatly encapsulated the girl-next-door image that had been so crucial to her success. In the aftermath of her death, emotions have run high. In her home town of Liverpool, thousands have

The recent announcement by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) that many graduates end up in jobs that do not require degrees is timely, but hardly surprising. The target that 50% of schoolchildren should ultimately progress to university was a typically barmy piece of lefty thinking. Worse still it was not based on any kind of evidence. It was based on a misguided idea of fairness. It needn’t have taken a genius to realise that the job market in any d

Pain is a subjective matter - or so I am told. What hurts one person, may not hurt the next as much and so on and so forth - in which case I can only assume that the people who adhere to this philosophy have never experienced adhesive capsulitis... It felt like I'd just been blitzed in the electric chair, a hundred million volts surging through my body or more precisely through my shoulder. I felt feint. Jesus, I'd never experienced pain like it. I hit the deck. My friends la

With her trademark cropped her, fragile beauty and involvement with subversive political groups, Jean Seberg was not exactly your average Hollywood starlet. French-speaking Seberg had been plucked from obscurity to star as Joan of Arc, a trailblazer of the New French Wave that took cinema by storm in the 1960s. Success might have been hers, but this waiflike creature was a restless soul. In fact, Seberg was the Queen of Woke long before Hollywood got in on the act. Take a mod