Yesterday I learned the sad news of the death of Maurice Roëves at 83. I was fortunate enough to work with Maurice on Solid Air (2003). He played the lead role of Robert Houston in a story inspired by my late father's experience of living with an asbestos-related disease and his struggle to win compensation.
When any celebrated figure dies there's usually a flurry of media interest. When the departed is particularly well-known, customarily they receive a fulsome obituary or a tribute. So I was disappointed to read identical articles in the Herald and the National quoting a director, Paul Carmichael, 'I once met him outside a hotel in London. One of the nicest people I've ever chatted to. RIP.' I know journalism is having a hard time, I thought, but this isn't going to win any Pulitzers. 'Outside a hotel?' Is that the best they can offer?
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Writing a Covid-19-free post is a struggle if not downright impossible. If I caved in to my rage over how this crisis is being mishandled I'd probably get arrested. As it is, currently I'm furloughed and on a 23-hour a day lockdown. Frankly I don't know how others are coping. What I do know is those charged with mental health services will reap a bitter whirlwind when this is over.
It took only days into this pandemic for pundits to opine how, on the other side of this catastrophe nothing will ever be the same. I sincerely hope so if 'the same' equates to a hard-boiled Brexit, Austerity V2 and a depression that will make the crash of 2008 look like someone made off with the menage money. Meanwhile a supine mainstream media shills for an incompetent, venal Tory government mandated to get away with anything, genocide included.
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It's now become increasingly clear that spring, summer and beyond are cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For students of disaster capitalism one thing's certain: the poor and vulnerable will suffer most, for as Warren Buffett reminds us, “it's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked." In this case, as the situation worsens, it's our politicians who will be called to account. And yet, I fear, nothing will change.
If I thought Brexit, austerity and climate catastrophe made the business of film seem trivial it's perhaps contradictory to suggest film is more necessary than ever but having glimpsed a world devoid of culture - with venues closed, shows cancelled and film and TV production postponed or ceased - it's not a prospect to relish.
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Broken politics, broken society and a broken planet: a premise for a movie I don't particularly want to see, let alone make. On TV there's an air of unreality about the State of Things when charity ads compete with exhortations to spend and when some survive on less than a living wage while others don't survive at all.
I'm not in the habit of making New Year resolutions but to mark 2020 my husband and I decided to give up live TV, sealed when the annual reminder for the TV Licence dropped on the mat. While debating whether or not to pay, I thought of my uncle who, when asked why he had no licence replied, "Ours works perfectly well without one." Not that there was much threat of prosecution since he lived with his family on the fifteenth floor of a Castlemilk high-rise knowing the TV Detector Van, a harbinger of dread in every Glasgow housing scheme, couldn't detect a device above one storey.
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