Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Monday, April 13, 2020
Beckett - a Quinn Martin production starring Sam Beckett
"A short lived detective drama from 1972. Never caught on with the American public."
With Andre the Giant as Little Bim, Jean Paul Sartre as Walleye Molloy and Jean Cocteau as Huggy Bear
"...cut together by playwright Danny Thompson, cofounder of Chicago’s Theater Oobleck." Ref: Open Culture. Via Martin Doyle on Twitter
Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Boycott Question Time
LENIN'S TOMB: The case for 'no platform': it's only good manners
Freedom of speech does not stretch to include any obligation on the BBC to host people whose participation in debate is not in good faith. The answer to this is for the main parties, especially Labour - at least Labour! plus the Liberals? - to refuse to appear on the show with the atavistic fascist pigs of the BNP. No platform.
Feargal
Freedom of speech does not stretch to include any obligation on the BBC to host people whose participation in debate is not in good faith. The answer to this is for the main parties, especially Labour - at least Labour! plus the Liberals? - to refuse to appear on the show with the atavistic fascist pigs of the BNP. No platform.
Feargal
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
British man arrested for role in running FileSoup file sharing website
"Among the concerns was the news that the goods seized during the operation were no longer being held by police, but had instead been handed over to the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), an accredited private group that often assists law enforcement with inquiries in such cases. ... A spokesman for FACT, which is funded by organisations such as BSkyB, Paramount and Sony Pictures, said it could not comment on an open investigation." (Guardian)
I'm all for the rights of copyright holders but where do these private organisations get the right to become part of the police service by receiving items of evidence seized from people's homes by the police? What's to stop say Kellogg's from demanding samples of food cooked by suspects to determine if their Corn Flakes patent is violated? Why don't we have Unilever check the laundry and Diageo check for unlicensed home brew? Come to think of it, send me everything as well, I want to see if the Willesden Herald's copyright has been breached. If it's good enough for BSkyB (an alias for Murdoch International) and centres of the ludicrously commercial and exploitative such as movie making companies, then it's good enough for the Willesden Herald.
Ossian
I'm all for the rights of copyright holders but where do these private organisations get the right to become part of the police service by receiving items of evidence seized from people's homes by the police? What's to stop say Kellogg's from demanding samples of food cooked by suspects to determine if their Corn Flakes patent is violated? Why don't we have Unilever check the laundry and Diageo check for unlicensed home brew? Come to think of it, send me everything as well, I want to see if the Willesden Herald's copyright has been breached. If it's good enough for BSkyB (an alias for Murdoch International) and centres of the ludicrously commercial and exploitative such as movie making companies, then it's good enough for the Willesden Herald.
Ossian
Monday, June 29, 2009
Boris on Jacko
Michael Jackson: It would be wrong to sneer at this outpouring of public grief - Telegraph: "[...] Never was someone so obviously and so literally unhappy in his own skin, and by his obsessional suffering he earned the potential sympathy of everyone who feels doubtful about their appearance, which is a fair chunk of the human race. [...] And by his musical triumphs, he proved the essential point, that you can look weird, feel weird, be weird – and still be a genius. In one sense Michael Jackson was beaten by the star system, in that it made demands about how he should look and behave which he felt he could never satisfy. In another sense he beat the system. He beat it by writing Beat It." (Boris Johnson)
Friday, June 26, 2009
Richard Littlejohn's racist rants etc.
Happened to be in the barbers today and nothing else to read but the Daily Mail rag. To be fair, this housepaper-in-waiting for the genocidal BNP dictatorship had one good double page memoir about sexual mores in France, which was worth reading - an eye opener as they say. However it also contained a pageful of brutal and racist rants by a big Jeremy Clarkson-like buffoon called Richard Littlejohn. Like Clarkson this blatherer Littlejohn has made a living out of being an arse in the media for years.
He criticizes the police in a strange backhanded way, for example he complains that a guy was Tasered three times while spreadeagled on the ground while also describing him as "a piece of lard who probably deserved a good kicking". He gets some things sort of half right, probably by accident, including pointing out the stupidity of Tasering a sheep that was blocking a road. He then goes on in another strange backhanded sort of way about police swimming lessons being cancelled in Wales because it would put Muslim women off joining.
What I really didn't like was how he then went on via a tenuous link to say (and I quote) that "the Warwickshire police are holding a pikey's picnic this weekend, inviting all members of 'the travelling community' to a day of festivities at the force's Leek Wootton headquarters. The manicured lawns of the country house HQ will play host to a traditional Roma band, story-telling and even 'a graffiti project'. I hope they remember to lock up their lawn-mowers." [My emphasis]
It's not just the word "pikey" - which is offensive enough, I think, but that remark about locking up their lawn-mowers. I don't think you need me to draw the historical parallels of vilification that little jibe evokes. Have people like him learned nothing from history? As long as this country thinks he and people like him are, in the American term, "good old boys" we are headed for the horrors.
Remember today, remember everything you see around you: the communities, the arts, the hospitals and hospices, the schools and special schools, the languages you hear everywhere, the public transport passes for pensioners, welfare for people in hardship, benefits, pensions, freedom, rights. All these things will be violently and wilfully destroyed and disappear forever if people like him have their way, if they ever gain power. All that will be left is a feudal system of mansions, with unrepaired roads between them and surrounded by hovels, the Brazil of Europe, a banana republic with no bananas and no republic, run on the divine right of inherited privilege.
We can start the fight by binning the Daily Mail. Let's also oppose the Tories 10% cuts proposals and their alliance with the far right parties of Europe. New Labour sucks, and Gordon's expenses fiasco (yes, let him own it all) sucks majorly but look around, there is regeneration everywhere: new sports centre, rebuilt secondary school, rebuilt community hospital all within five minutes walk of where I live. When you go to a hospital appointment, you don't have to wait as long to be seen. There are new tests that are pro-actively promulgated for preventive medicine. There is a minimum wage. These are just some of the things one could list.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, let's purge lazy and concupiscent MP's but let us not install Lord Snooty and his friends to try to turn the clock back. Don't let them dismantle and sell off the investment that has been made. At the very worst, a Lib-Lab pact can survive. It is by no means over till it's over. Cameron is "measuring the curtains for 10 Downing Street" and therein lies his party's Achilles' heel: they think they have it in the bag, they have seen the winning post too soon.
Feargal
He criticizes the police in a strange backhanded way, for example he complains that a guy was Tasered three times while spreadeagled on the ground while also describing him as "a piece of lard who probably deserved a good kicking". He gets some things sort of half right, probably by accident, including pointing out the stupidity of Tasering a sheep that was blocking a road. He then goes on in another strange backhanded sort of way about police swimming lessons being cancelled in Wales because it would put Muslim women off joining.
What I really didn't like was how he then went on via a tenuous link to say (and I quote) that "the Warwickshire police are holding a pikey's picnic this weekend, inviting all members of 'the travelling community' to a day of festivities at the force's Leek Wootton headquarters. The manicured lawns of the country house HQ will play host to a traditional Roma band, story-telling and even 'a graffiti project'. I hope they remember to lock up their lawn-mowers." [My emphasis]
It's not just the word "pikey" - which is offensive enough, I think, but that remark about locking up their lawn-mowers. I don't think you need me to draw the historical parallels of vilification that little jibe evokes. Have people like him learned nothing from history? As long as this country thinks he and people like him are, in the American term, "good old boys" we are headed for the horrors.
Remember today, remember everything you see around you: the communities, the arts, the hospitals and hospices, the schools and special schools, the languages you hear everywhere, the public transport passes for pensioners, welfare for people in hardship, benefits, pensions, freedom, rights. All these things will be violently and wilfully destroyed and disappear forever if people like him have their way, if they ever gain power. All that will be left is a feudal system of mansions, with unrepaired roads between them and surrounded by hovels, the Brazil of Europe, a banana republic with no bananas and no republic, run on the divine right of inherited privilege.
We can start the fight by binning the Daily Mail. Let's also oppose the Tories 10% cuts proposals and their alliance with the far right parties of Europe. New Labour sucks, and Gordon's expenses fiasco (yes, let him own it all) sucks majorly but look around, there is regeneration everywhere: new sports centre, rebuilt secondary school, rebuilt community hospital all within five minutes walk of where I live. When you go to a hospital appointment, you don't have to wait as long to be seen. There are new tests that are pro-actively promulgated for preventive medicine. There is a minimum wage. These are just some of the things one could list.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, let's purge lazy and concupiscent MP's but let us not install Lord Snooty and his friends to try to turn the clock back. Don't let them dismantle and sell off the investment that has been made. At the very worst, a Lib-Lab pact can survive. It is by no means over till it's over. Cameron is "measuring the curtains for 10 Downing Street" and therein lies his party's Achilles' heel: they think they have it in the bag, they have seen the winning post too soon.
Feargal
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Setanta can battle the (air)waves no more
Setanta Sport goes into administration this afternoon after the collapse of the business in Britain (Belfast Telegraph)
It is doubtful you will find this combination of picture and newspaper very often.
It is doubtful you will find this combination of picture and newspaper very often.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Britain's got bastards
I said before that child sang tonight on "Britain's Got Talent", I said to the wife, "This is totally unethical, they are destroying children's lives and making fools of people." It's like the Roman Coliseum of psychology. It is in keeping with the barking idea that it's okay to torture a small child psychologically but not to give a little slap when it's naughty. Instead of a brief natural and transient response we are expected to put kids into solitary confinement, starve them, make them stand or sit in corners, make them denounce themselves and apologise. Then we take kids and we throw them into a sort of bear pit in front of a thousand sadists and tell them to sing and dance. Now we are being sold children's nervous breakdowns like anti-LSD tabs to narrow our horizons and reduce us to whooping chimpanzees. Just say no.
Feargal
Feargal
Monday, April 20, 2009
Only in the Telegraph
In which the Sunday Closing riots of 1855 prove exactly analogous in the matter of police behaviour regarding more recent events
"One witness had seen a constable 155, but when the man with that number appeared before the commission, his superior officer explained that he was employed by the Inland Revenue checking omnibus numbers, and the man said that last time he had worn his uniform was at the Duke of Wellington's funeral (in 1852)."
Not sure why, but like everything at which we feel constrained not to laugh for reasons of injury and propriety, the whole report is hilarious.
Feargal
"One witness had seen a constable 155, but when the man with that number appeared before the commission, his superior officer explained that he was employed by the Inland Revenue checking omnibus numbers, and the man said that last time he had worn his uniform was at the Duke of Wellington's funeral (in 1852)."
Not sure why, but like everything at which we feel constrained not to laugh for reasons of injury and propriety, the whole report is hilarious.
Feargal
Monday, January 26, 2009
The DEC appeal that BBC & Sky are ashamed to show
Video: Gaza aid appeal
"The Gaza aid appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to be broadcast by ITV, Channel 4 and Five but rejected by the BBC and Sky" (Guardian Online)
"The Gaza aid appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to be broadcast by ITV, Channel 4 and Five but rejected by the BBC and Sky" (Guardian Online)
Campaign to boycott the BBC licence fee
Letters
The proposal: From April 1st 2009, no further licence fee subscriptions to be paid to the BBC. The BBC receives approximately two billion pounds extorted from every family in the country, with the exception of the extremely elderly, regardless of ability to pay. It is a poll tax.
Additionally the BBC has now proved that it is not representative of public opinion and is used as a tool of the craven government's corrupt foreign policy. As a result it is literally covering up, hiding the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, purely because it is beholden to the government and Israel for its luxuriant position embedded and dependent utterly in and on the status quo. The interests of the British public and the world on the other hand, depend on the dismantling of the status quo and on progressive policies.
If we all sign up to boycott starting from April 1st, we will have strength in numbers. Meanwhile the prospect of bankruptcy can concentrate the minds of the grovelling, backsliding sluggards who run the corporation.
A Reader, Kilburn
The proposal: From April 1st 2009, no further licence fee subscriptions to be paid to the BBC. The BBC receives approximately two billion pounds extorted from every family in the country, with the exception of the extremely elderly, regardless of ability to pay. It is a poll tax.
Additionally the BBC has now proved that it is not representative of public opinion and is used as a tool of the craven government's corrupt foreign policy. As a result it is literally covering up, hiding the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, purely because it is beholden to the government and Israel for its luxuriant position embedded and dependent utterly in and on the status quo. The interests of the British public and the world on the other hand, depend on the dismantling of the status quo and on progressive policies.
If we all sign up to boycott starting from April 1st, we will have strength in numbers. Meanwhile the prospect of bankruptcy can concentrate the minds of the grovelling, backsliding sluggards who run the corporation.
A Reader, Kilburn
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Defy the BBC & Murdoch Int'l: Help the people of Gaza
Donate Now to the DEC Gaza Crisis Appeal.
Willesden Herald has donated £25 by the way (our horse came in)*. Only telling to encourage our readers to match it, not looking for any plaudits.
* What a pity it's not the BBC licence fee instead. Everyone has to give £100+ annually to Jonathan Ross & Co, even as they block an urgent disaster appeal. Ed
P.S. Don't be a mug and waste your money on Sky's ugly satellite dishes and tacky programming. Everything you need is on Freeview or cable. Give it to DEC instead. Ed
Sunday, January 11, 2009
January 20th - The Tricycle, Kilburn
OBAMA INAUGURATION PARTY!
"Celebrate the inauguration of America’s first black president at the Tricycle. On January 20th we will be screening the inauguration ceremony live in the cinema with American beer, pretzels and cheerleaders completing the party. Event takes place 4.30-8pm. Tickets £16/£15, all proceeds to the Tricycle Education Programme. Now open for booking."
"Celebrate the inauguration of America’s first black president at the Tricycle. On January 20th we will be screening the inauguration ceremony live in the cinema with American beer, pretzels and cheerleaders completing the party. Event takes place 4.30-8pm. Tickets £16/£15, all proceeds to the Tricycle Education Programme. Now open for booking."
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Count Arthur Strong's Christmas radio show
If you need a good laugh
This guy has a direct connection to the laughter centre in my brain (if there is such a thing, the titteralamus?). I'm totally poleaxed by everything he says. "Never mind playstations. The people in the Bible would've considered themselves lucky if Father Christmas had brought them a tangerine and Cluedo." (Count the ways in which that is wrong.) He tells the story of Mary and Judas's (sic) journey to Bethlehem and how they couldn't find anywhere to stay because it was Christmas, and had to settle for a pigsty. He's had a similar experience himself in Brighton.
Ossian
This guy has a direct connection to the laughter centre in my brain (if there is such a thing, the titteralamus?). I'm totally poleaxed by everything he says. "Never mind playstations. The people in the Bible would've considered themselves lucky if Father Christmas had brought them a tangerine and Cluedo." (Count the ways in which that is wrong.) He tells the story of Mary and Judas's (sic) journey to Bethlehem and how they couldn't find anywhere to stay because it was Christmas, and had to settle for a pigsty. He's had a similar experience himself in Brighton.
Ossian
Monday, August 18, 2008
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Count Arthur Strong's radio show
Last episode of the present series: Piddler on the Roof (expires in a few days)
"It'll not be the first time I've performed concussed, and I certainly hope it won't be the last" (Count Arthur Strong)
Did I mention before that this is the funniest thing in the world? If you have any ailments, take this and call yourself in the morning.
Update: You can see and hear the abovementioned noted thespian here.
Ossian
"It'll not be the first time I've performed concussed, and I certainly hope it won't be the last" (Count Arthur Strong)
Did I mention before that this is the funniest thing in the world? If you have any ailments, take this and call yourself in the morning.
Update: You can see and hear the abovementioned noted thespian here.
Ossian
Friday, May 30, 2008
Diageo hard liquor advertised to kids on ITV teatime
Diageo Great Britain [sponsors] ITV weather’s UV updates during the early evening news as part of £1.4 million summer marketing campaign
Am I the only one somewhat dismayed at the current campaigns promoting Baileys Irish Cream booze, Gordons Gin and Smirnoff vodka on the ITV early evening news? These ads for drinks mixed with ginger ale, for example (today), are running alongside adverts for kids' soft drinks, sometimes directly after one for a soft drink (the other day). They are creepily oriented in a way that makes them sound like some good old kids' treat. Summer 2008 with lashings of gin and ginger ale: Enid Blyton turns into Edna the Inebriate Woman.
FFS Diageo (and ITV!), exercise some judgement and get behind the watershed. This present manifestation of greedy, unscrupulous, predatory behaviour is really outrageous. It's clearly based on the old Jesuit principle, give me the boy aged seven and I'll give you the man. It's a transparent and evil (there is no other word) attempt to implant a boozy notion of summer into childrens' minds before they are fully able to know they're being got at.
Zoz
Am I the only one somewhat dismayed at the current campaigns promoting Baileys Irish Cream booze, Gordons Gin and Smirnoff vodka on the ITV early evening news? These ads for drinks mixed with ginger ale, for example (today), are running alongside adverts for kids' soft drinks, sometimes directly after one for a soft drink (the other day). They are creepily oriented in a way that makes them sound like some good old kids' treat. Summer 2008 with lashings of gin and ginger ale: Enid Blyton turns into Edna the Inebriate Woman.
FFS Diageo (and ITV!), exercise some judgement and get behind the watershed. This present manifestation of greedy, unscrupulous, predatory behaviour is really outrageous. It's clearly based on the old Jesuit principle, give me the boy aged seven and I'll give you the man. It's a transparent and evil (there is no other word) attempt to implant a boozy notion of summer into childrens' minds before they are fully able to know they're being got at.
Zoz
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Don't miss: BBC online iPlayer
If you missed Extras, the final episode/Christmas special, as I nearly did (the only thing I wanted to see over Christmas - well, that and the new Oliver Twist) you can still watch it for another 6 days on the new BBC iPlayer. It's absolutely brilliant. I even want to use an exclamation mark! There! That's how brilliant it is! Oliver Twist is on there as well: I watched it all in one go overnight, when that was repeated on sign zone.
Update: You can watch everything broadcast by the BBC in the last seven days on iPlayer. (I think it only works if you're in the UK. Can anybody confirm that?) In effect you don't need a television anymore, and you can do your own scheduling. However, there is something good in the feeling of watching a brilliant new production "as it goes out", and knowing that many others are too.
Ossian
Monday, January 08, 2007
Willesden short story prize 2007: Result
Short list
"Born Again" by Shakti Bhatt
"Charles Magezi-Akiiki" by Olesya Mishechkina
"Felipe and the Sea" by Jonathan Attrill
"Jolt" by James Lawless
"Kid in a Well" by Willie Davis
"Mrs Nakamoto Takes a Vacation" by Steve Finbow
"Paradise" by Nicholas Hogg
"The Dead Don't Do That Kind of Thing" by Wes Lee
"Vaselino" by Lee Joans
"Words from a Glass Bubble" by Tobias Williams
Winner
And the winner of the Willesden short story prize 2007, as chosen by Zadie Smith, is "Kid in a Well" by Willie Davis.
Willie Davis is a native of Whitesburg, Kentucky who currently teaches English at The University of Maryland. "Kid in a Well" is a chapter from The Darktown Strut, his recently completed novel about contemporary Appalachian life.
Many thanks to everyone who took part and to formerly famous poet Rockwell "Rocky" Rollins and WH media correspondent Amanda Saxonheart for hazarding their eyesight over the strange fonts submitted. Thanks to Zadie Smith for adjudicating.
Judge's report
"Amongst many high concept competitors, 'Kid in a Well' stood out for me for its relative simplicity, neat characterisation, and laconic, relaxed structure. It's a story genuinely interested in its characters rather than fascinated with its own form, and offers the reader humour over authorial hubris. I really enjoyed it. Congratulations, Willie, and enjoy your mug! I have one and I love it." Zadie Smith
Anthology
The forthcoming anthology "New Short Stories 1" (Pretend Genius, 2007) will feature the winning story together with all but one of the short list and a selection of other stories commended by the editorial team, including (confirmed):
"Alternative Medicine" by Laura Solomon
"Atlantic Drift" by Arthur Allan
"Avoiding the Issue" by Laura Heggie
It will also feature more of the virtuosic series Microworld by 19-year-old Olesya Mishechkina, from which "Charles Magezi-Akiiki" is taken.
Update (Feb '07)
Also including "Dodie's Gift", last year's joint-winner by Vanessa Gebbie
Ed
Syndication: Wreuters / Sphagnum
"Born Again" by Shakti Bhatt
"Charles Magezi-Akiiki" by Olesya Mishechkina
"Felipe and the Sea" by Jonathan Attrill
"Jolt" by James Lawless
"Kid in a Well" by Willie Davis
"Mrs Nakamoto Takes a Vacation" by Steve Finbow
"Paradise" by Nicholas Hogg
"The Dead Don't Do That Kind of Thing" by Wes Lee
"Vaselino" by Lee Joans
"Words from a Glass Bubble" by Tobias Williams
Winner
And the winner of the Willesden short story prize 2007, as chosen by Zadie Smith, is "Kid in a Well" by Willie Davis.
Willie Davis is a native of Whitesburg, Kentucky who currently teaches English at The University of Maryland. "Kid in a Well" is a chapter from The Darktown Strut, his recently completed novel about contemporary Appalachian life.
Many thanks to everyone who took part and to formerly famous poet Rockwell "Rocky" Rollins and WH media correspondent Amanda Saxonheart for hazarding their eyesight over the strange fonts submitted. Thanks to Zadie Smith for adjudicating.
Judge's report
"Amongst many high concept competitors, 'Kid in a Well' stood out for me for its relative simplicity, neat characterisation, and laconic, relaxed structure. It's a story genuinely interested in its characters rather than fascinated with its own form, and offers the reader humour over authorial hubris. I really enjoyed it. Congratulations, Willie, and enjoy your mug! I have one and I love it." Zadie Smith
Anthology
The forthcoming anthology "New Short Stories 1" (Pretend Genius, 2007) will feature the winning story together with all but one of the short list and a selection of other stories commended by the editorial team, including (confirmed):
"Alternative Medicine" by Laura Solomon
"Atlantic Drift" by Arthur Allan
"Avoiding the Issue" by Laura Heggie
It will also feature more of the virtuosic series Microworld by 19-year-old Olesya Mishechkina, from which "Charles Magezi-Akiiki" is taken.
Update (Feb '07)
Also including "Dodie's Gift", last year's joint-winner by Vanessa Gebbie
Ed
Syndication: Wreuters / Sphagnum
Friday, December 15, 2006
Insurrection
RTÉ Easter Week schedule 1966 commemorating the 1916 rising
I've always remembered the brilliant dramatisation "Insurrection" (written by Hugh Leonard) and wished I could see it again. There are several excerpts from it online now. (Why don't they put the whole thing up?) Although it looks different, naturally dated somewhat, I still think the clips are great.
From Episode 1
From Episode 2
From Episode 3
From Episode 4
From Episode 5
From Episode 6
From Episode 7
From Episode 8
The RTÉ archives also contain marvellous interviews with survivors such as James Connolly's daughter, recalling her and her mother's visit to him before he was shot. Every day of the week has a separate page with a list of the special schedule for TV and radio and clips, though it's a pity how many have been lost. (I know, one could say that about people as well.)
Here is a clip from an interview with Kathleen Clarke widow of Thomas Clarke, one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic (all shot). "You must make your goodbyes as casual as possible...I didn't really ever see that he'd come through, I must say."
Kathleen Clarke is also in this clip, talking about P. H. Pearse. One gathers that she remembers him not with any fondness, as an exceptionally silent type.
Former president Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh recalls the looting in O'Connell Street and his failed attempt to deal with it under orders from General (James) Connolly. Connolly subsequently talks about sending somebody to shoot some of the looters: "Shooting over their heads is useless. Unless some of them are shot, they won't stop." Ó Ceallaigh requests and is allowed to be excused from that duty. He doesn't know if it was actually done. Here he is again, talking about the release of Bulmer Hobson.
"Seán F. Kavanagh, a member of the Irish Brigade, recalls meeting [Roger] Casement at the Hotel Saxonia in Berlin on 10 April 1916." (About Roger Casement)
"In this [vivid] extract, Norah Connolly O'Brien recalls making her way back to Dublin and her concern to find out how her father was." She recalls a friend telling her, "They're all dead and slaughtered. She battered us with words..." In another extract, she describes her [and her mother's] final visit to her father before his execution." Very beautiful, the words, but heart-rending. Because of Connolly's injuries his execution was worse, if that is possible, than the others: they shot him sitting in a chair.
After the surrender, the hostility of other Dubliners to the rebels as they were marched away, is recalled by one of the prisoners. He thought that there was nothing left of Dublin, it was all fire, "still burning."
There are other recollections of the leaders, people and events as well as coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies, the march in Belfast, and speeches by that sanctimonious old prig De Valera, who was largely responsible for the miseries of Ireland after 1916.
I was 11 in Easter, 1966. For the fiftieth anniversary of the rising, we had three giant new flagpoles installed by the entrance to the De La Salle primary school in Finglas, and we'd been practicing for weeks to sing on the occasion of their inauguration: The Foggy Dew and Roddy McCorley. About the hemp rope on his neck, the golden ringlets clung.
We were then all bused into O'Connell Street on Easter Sunday and marched to Croke Park for an extraordinary pageant. There were parades and displays by hundreds of variously costumed people portraying Irish history. Here's an archive recording about the 'Aiséiri' [rising] pageant. The whole effect of the commemorations was an inoculation of nationalism that never needs any booster shots. The next time I marched from O'Connell Street was the Wednesday after Bloody Sunday in 1972, with 100,000 in protest to the British Embassy.
Perhaps I should close with the special version of the national anthem that was used at closedown every night for the week, with drawings of the seven signatories ending up with Pearse, proving again that the writing of poetry is no guide to good character.
Ossian
I've always remembered the brilliant dramatisation "Insurrection" (written by Hugh Leonard) and wished I could see it again. There are several excerpts from it online now. (Why don't they put the whole thing up?) Although it looks different, naturally dated somewhat, I still think the clips are great.
From Episode 1
From Episode 2
From Episode 3
From Episode 4
From Episode 5
From Episode 6
From Episode 7
From Episode 8
The RTÉ archives also contain marvellous interviews with survivors such as James Connolly's daughter, recalling her and her mother's visit to him before he was shot. Every day of the week has a separate page with a list of the special schedule for TV and radio and clips, though it's a pity how many have been lost. (I know, one could say that about people as well.)
Here is a clip from an interview with Kathleen Clarke widow of Thomas Clarke, one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic (all shot). "You must make your goodbyes as casual as possible...I didn't really ever see that he'd come through, I must say."
Kathleen Clarke is also in this clip, talking about P. H. Pearse. One gathers that she remembers him not with any fondness, as an exceptionally silent type.
Former president Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh recalls the looting in O'Connell Street and his failed attempt to deal with it under orders from General (James) Connolly. Connolly subsequently talks about sending somebody to shoot some of the looters: "Shooting over their heads is useless. Unless some of them are shot, they won't stop." Ó Ceallaigh requests and is allowed to be excused from that duty. He doesn't know if it was actually done. Here he is again, talking about the release of Bulmer Hobson.
"Seán F. Kavanagh, a member of the Irish Brigade, recalls meeting [Roger] Casement at the Hotel Saxonia in Berlin on 10 April 1916." (About Roger Casement)
"In this [vivid] extract, Norah Connolly O'Brien recalls making her way back to Dublin and her concern to find out how her father was." She recalls a friend telling her, "They're all dead and slaughtered. She battered us with words..." In another extract, she describes her [and her mother's] final visit to her father before his execution." Very beautiful, the words, but heart-rending. Because of Connolly's injuries his execution was worse, if that is possible, than the others: they shot him sitting in a chair.
After the surrender, the hostility of other Dubliners to the rebels as they were marched away, is recalled by one of the prisoners. He thought that there was nothing left of Dublin, it was all fire, "still burning."
There are other recollections of the leaders, people and events as well as coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies, the march in Belfast, and speeches by that sanctimonious old prig De Valera, who was largely responsible for the miseries of Ireland after 1916.
I was 11 in Easter, 1966. For the fiftieth anniversary of the rising, we had three giant new flagpoles installed by the entrance to the De La Salle primary school in Finglas, and we'd been practicing for weeks to sing on the occasion of their inauguration: The Foggy Dew and Roddy McCorley. About the hemp rope on his neck, the golden ringlets clung.
We were then all bused into O'Connell Street on Easter Sunday and marched to Croke Park for an extraordinary pageant. There were parades and displays by hundreds of variously costumed people portraying Irish history. Here's an archive recording about the 'Aiséiri' [rising] pageant. The whole effect of the commemorations was an inoculation of nationalism that never needs any booster shots. The next time I marched from O'Connell Street was the Wednesday after Bloody Sunday in 1972, with 100,000 in protest to the British Embassy.
Perhaps I should close with the special version of the national anthem that was used at closedown every night for the week, with drawings of the seven signatories ending up with Pearse, proving again that the writing of poetry is no guide to good character.
Ossian
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