Star Trek – Blood and Porridge

May 28, 2024June 7, 2024

The writer on the edge of forever

I’ve just discovered that yesterday, May 27^th, would have been the 90^th birthday of writer Harlan Ellison. I don’t know if nowadays I’d describe Ellison as one of my all-time favourite writers, but he was certainly a massive influence on me when I was growing up and trying to write stuff myself. Here’s an updated version of something I wrote about him in 2018, just after he’d passed away at the age of 84.

Harlan Ellison was often categorised as a science-fiction writer, although he once memorably warned anyone who called him a science-fiction writer that he would come to their house and ‘nail’ their ‘pet’s head to a coffee table’. In his lifetime the Cleveland-born Ellison authored some 1800 stories, scripts, reviews, articles and opinion pieces, but it’s as a short story writer that he was best known. In fact, when he was in his prime, from the 1960s to 1980s, he was responsible for some of the boldest and most exhilarating short stories I’d yet come across. He seemed to push both his imagination and his writing energies to the very limit.

Describing his stories is difficult, but the nearest comparison I can think of is the fiction of Ray Bradbury. However, Ellison’s work also had counter-cultural and radical political tones that encompassed both the idealism of the 1960s’ civil rights movement and Summer of Love and the cynicism and despair that came with the Vietnam War and, in the 1970s, Watergate. His short stories frequently contained a palpable anger too. Yes, Ellison had a lot of anger in him. More on that in a minute.

By focusing on his short stories, I don’t wish to denigrate his occasional novels. Indeed, I’d rank 1961’s Spider Kiss alongside Iain Banks’ Espedair Street (1987) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008) as one of the best rock ‘n’ roll novels ever.

Ellison wasn’t a big name in the UK but in the 1970s – perfectly timed for my development as a teenager – Britain’s Pan Books brought out editions of several of his short story collections, like The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969), Approaching Oblivion (1974) and Deathbird Stories (1975). All had gorgeously psychedelic covers by (I think) the artist Bob Layzell. It’s fair to say that my 14 or 15-year-old mind was blown by them.

© Pan Books

I also loved how Ellison prefaced each story with a short essay describing how it had come into being. These pieces gave insight not only into his combative personality but also into the rich life-experiences he’d had, or claimed to have had. Before establishing himself as a writer he’d been, among other things, a truck driver transporting nitro-glycerine, a hired gun and a tuna fisherman. This inspired me when I was a budding writer to try my hand at different jobs and build up my experiences, though the stuff I ended up doing – stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s, working in a shoe warehouse, serving as a warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel – was rather less glamorous than the items on Ellison’s CV.

Some of his work also appeared on television, although TV was a medium he generally had a low opinion of. In a 2013 interview he accused it and other modern forms of entertainment and communication of having “reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form that it is beyond my notice.”

For instance, he scripted the 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, which has Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy catapulted back in time to 1930s America and confronted with an agonising time-travel-related moral dilemma. Do they intervene in an accident and prevent the death of a woman called Edith Keeler who (despite being played by Joan Collins) is a noble political activist dedicated to peace, pacifism and public service and with whom, predictably, William Shatner’s horn-dog Captain Kirk has fallen in love; or do they let her die, which means her political movement won’t gain power in the USA, delay her country’s entry into World War II and allow the Nazis to become masters of humanity, which will happen otherwise?

Thanks to its inventive and thought-provoking spin on time travel, The City… is the best episode of the original series of Star Trek. In fact, as I don’t like any of the later TV incarnations of Star Trek, I’d say it’s the best Star Trek episode, full stop. Ellison, however, was unimpressed with how the show’s producer Gene Rodenberry and his writing staff rewrote his script and watered down some of its themes and was never slow to sound off about it afterwards. It may be significant that his later short story How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? (1977) features William Shatner attempting to make love to a revolting-looking alien creature. Shatner’s toupee falls off in the process.

© Desilu Productions

More time-travelling figures in the Ellison-penned episodes Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier that he wrote for the TV anthology show The Outer Limits (1963-65). Years later, he was incensed at what he saw as plagiarism of elements of his Soldier script by James Cameron while he was making the first Terminator movie in 1984. Ellison threatened to sue and got a payment of 65-70,000 dollars from Cameron’s financiers and an acknowledgement on The Terminator’s credits. By 2014 Ellison had mellowed to the point where he could see the funny side of it. He played himself in an episode of The Simpsons in which he gets into an argument with Milhouse Van Houten. When Millhouse comments, “I wish someone would have come from the future and warned me not to talk to you,” Ellison grabs him by the throat and screams, “That’s my idea!”

In fact, Ellison was highly litigious. After discovering his writing, I found an interview with him in an American magazine called Future Life where he talked about suing Paramount Television for stealing an idea of his, about a robot policeman and a human one who are partnered together, and turning it into a TV show called Future Cop (1976-78). “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” he declared in the interview. Later, when I was playing rugby for my school and while we were trying to psych ourselves up against our opponents, I inadvertently let slip with Ellison’s phrase: “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” I exclaimed. That earned me some strange looks from my teammates. Nailing asses to barn doors was not part of the common vernacular on south-of-Scotland rugby pitches.

I can honestly say that for a period when I was a teenager, Harlan Ellison, with his mind-bending fiction, his braggadocio, his adventurous backstory and his take-no-shit-from-anyone attitude was the person I wanted to be. Of course, as I grew older and became less impressionable and more mature, and learned more about Ellison, that changed. I began to appreciate that Ellison’s persona involved a fair bit of self-mythologizing, egotism and unwarranted bloody-mindedness. When Stephen King observed that he knew one writer who was convinced that Ellison was the reincarnation of Jonathan Swift and another writer who referred to him as a ‘son-of-a-bitch’, I found myself in sympathy with both viewpoints.

And by the time I read a profile of him in a non-fiction book called Dream Makers (1980), written by Charles Platt, I was disappointed but somehow unsurprised to encounter a character rather too driven by vanity and rather too desperate to impress. Ellison and Platt later fell out badly, violently it’s said, though not as far as I know about the Dream Makers profile.

Also falling out with Ellison was the late English writer Christopher Priest, who took issue with Ellison’s editorship of the Dangerous Visions series of science fiction anthologies in the early 1970s. There was supposed to be a third volume in the series but for reasons known only to Ellison himself it never appeared, leaving a lot of commissioned stories in limbo and depriving a lot of authors of potential earnings. This seems hypocritical of Ellison, considering how famously touchy he was about payment for his own work – he’s said to have once mailed a wayward publisher ‘213 bricks’ and a ‘dead gopher’ as a protest. Priest even wrote a short, investigative book about Dangerous Visions 3’s non-appearance, inevitably entitled The Book on the Edge of Forever (1994). Priest’s website notes how an anonymous review of his book on Amazon, headlined Mean-Spirited Jealousy and giving it one star, “bears all the hallmarks of Mr Ellison’s own unmistakable style: florid overstatement and a fog of half-truths intended to cloud the issue. Well worth a visit to witness the great man in action, a rare sight!”

© Fantagraphics Books

And although Ellison was a vocal supporter of the USA’s Equal Rights Amendment, much of that good work was undone in 2006 when he groped the writer Connie Willis onstage at an awards ceremony. I’ve seen a clip of the incident and am inclined to think Ellison believed he was indulging in some harmless japery, but that’s not to say he wasn’t massively disrespectful towards Willis and didn’t make a colossal arse of himself. He also did himself no favours when, after he’d issued an apology – one commentator described it as something that “could only loosely be construed by a chimpanzee whacked on smack as an apology” – and after Willis hadn’t acknowledged it, he ranted abusively about her on his official message board.

Still, as I came to know the artist’s failings, and revised my opinion of him, I focused more on the quality of the art itself. And with Ellison, some of that art was amazing. Here’s a list of ten of his short stories that bowled me over when I read them.

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966). An unremarkable little man suddenly finds his soul transplanted into the body of a Conan-the-Barbarian-type swordsman in a blood-and-thunder fantasy land. What follows is a merciless dissection of the inadequacies of the nerdy males who read sword-and-sorcery stories. I actually write sword-and-sorcery stories, so I’m allowed to make sweeping generalisations like that.

Pretty Maggie Money Eyes (1967). This sad, haunting story is about a woman’s spirit inhabiting a Las Vegas slot machine and the down-on-his-luck gambler whom she – possibly – takes pity on.

© LQ / Jaf Productions

A Boy and His Dog (1969). A post-apocalyptic satire that’s a spot-on blend of anarchy and irreverence, featuring as its main character a young hoodlum and an intelligent, telepathic and sarcastic canine. It was filmed in 1975 by L.Q. Jones, with a youthful Don Johnson in the lead (human) role. Though the movie version isn’t perfect, it still holds up better than a lot of other, more portentous sci-fi films made in the same decade.

Along the Scenic Route (1969). A biting analysis of the relationship between Americans and their cars, Scenic Route details how a couple out for a leisurely drive end up competing in a lethal demolition derby. It prefigures a lot of ‘dystopian-vehicle’ movies like Death Race 2000 (1975) and the Mad Max ones.

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970). Another of Ellison’s time-travel tales, this grippingly melancholic one is about a man going back in time and befriending his younger self while he’s a bullied, insecure child.

Bleeding Stones (1973). This is quite simply a story that made my jaw drop with its combination of brutality, blasphemy and surrealism.

© Pan Books

Hindsight: 480 Seconds (1973). End-of-the-world stories are a dime-a-dozen in science fiction, but the brilliantly simple yet elegiac concept behind this one has always stayed with me. It’s about a poet who volunteers to stay on an about-to-be-destroyed earth after the rest of humanity have been evacuated, so that he can provide a commentary on his planet’s dying minutes.

I’m Looking for Kadak (1974). This Kurt-Vonnegut-meets-Woody-Allen-type comedy is about the tribulations facing a group of blue, eleven-armed aliens on a far-flung planet who’ve converted to Judaism. The minyan – quorum – for communal Jewish worship is ten, and they want to sit shiva, i.e., conduct the rituals of mourning for a departed friend. The problem is that there’s now only nine of them on the planet. So the hero sets off on an epic quest to find a long-lost Jew, Kadak, in the hope he’ll serve as the tenth.

Shatterday (1975). In this unsettling tale, a man accidentally phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself. In fact, this other self is a sinister doppelganger who’s appeared from nowhere and is planning to usurp him from his existence.

Count the Clock That Tells the Time (1979). Taking its title from a sonnet by William Shakespeare, this describes how a lethargic never-do-well gets trapped in a weird, ghostly netherworld. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of wasting time and frittering your life away – something you couldn’t accuse the famously prolific Ellison of doing.

So, thank you for the entertainment and the inspiration, Mr E. May you rest in un-cantankerous and non-litigious peace.

© Pan Books

November 30, 2022December 2, 2022

Favourite Scots words I-L

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Evanson

Today is St Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland. So, in keeping with tradition on this blog, here’s the latest instalment in my A-Z of the always-fascinating Scots language….

Once upon a time, the main detractors of the Scots tongue seemed to be those snobby, London-based, Oxbridge-educated fossils who ran Britain’s literary establishment. I’m thinking of the furore that greeted James Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late winning the Booker Prize in 1994. How Late… was written uncompromisingly in the voice of a working-class Glaswegian and its success did not go down well in many posh quarters. Simon Jenkins, for instance, described it getting the Booker as ‘literary vandalism’, Kelman as an ‘illiterate savage’, and the novel itself as “the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk.”

But compare that with the reaction of Britain’s literary establishment to last year’s Deep Wheel Orcadia, the science-fiction verse-novel by Harry Josephine Giles, which is told in Orcadian and which won 2022’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. Deep Wheel Orcadia has been greeted respectfully, for example, here and here, rather than with the horrified pearl-clutching or bemused mockery that used to be the norm.

No, looking at social media, it seems to me that nowadays the folk who bash the Scots language most, and who virulently denigrate people who use it, are Scottish ones – those of a Conservative and / or Unionist disposition. The more extreme members of this faction profess to be loyal subjects of ‘the King’ (Charles presumably, not Elvis) and staunch supporters of a certain football team in Glasgow. They also slather their Twitter profiles in Union Jacks and, without a shred of irony, declare that they ‘hate nationalism’.

In other words, Scots has become part of a culture war. It’s been aligned with the Scottish independence movement and the independence-seeking Scottish government at one end of the battlefield; while at the battlefield’s other end, Unionists and British nationalists deny that Scots exists or deride it as ‘slang’ or ‘an accent’ or (at best) ‘a dialect of English’. Likewise, they do down any sort of Scottish culture that suggests Scotland is slightly different from England and the inhabitants of Great Britain aren’t just a single, homogenous mass. Hence, you get the likes of Ian Smart, self-styled ‘lefty lawyer’ and ‘Scottish Labour Party hack’, dismissing former Machar (Scotland’s Poet Laureate) and writer-in-Scots Jackie Kay as “a woman from Bishopbriggs, writing doggerel”, and slandering another Scots-using author, Emma Grae, as a ‘white nationalist’.

Scotland’s other language, Gaelic, gets it in the neck from these types all the time too. Witness the celebrated episode where right-wing Scottish troll Effie Deans complained on social media about how road-signs in Gaelic caused her to get lost in the Fort William area. This was despite the place-names being printed in English as well as in Gaelic on the signs. “She’s like a post-imperial psychotic satnav gone wrong,” commented one wit on Twitter.

Anyway, here’s a further selection of my favourite words in Scots, this time those beginning with the letters ‘I’, ‘J’, ‘K’ and ‘L’. And Scots is a language. If you don’t like that assertion, you can stick it up your hole.

From google.com/maps

Inch (n) – not the unit of measurement but a geographical word with two meanings, both of which turn up in Scottish place-names. It can be a small island (see Inchmurrin in Loch Lomond, which is actually the largest freshwater island in the British and Irish islands), or an expanse of flat ground next to a river (see Markinch in Fife).

Irn Bru (n/adj) – Scotland’s ‘other national drink’, the fizzy, luridly-coloured, non-alcoholic beverage that’s claimed to be both a hangover cure and the only soft drink in the world not to be outsold by Coca Cola in its native country. I’m not sure if either of these claims stands up to scientific scrutiny, but who cares? All right, Irn Bru is a trademark more than a vocabulary item, but I’ve seen it used as an adjective meaning ‘orange’, for instance, as in “the Irn Bru-coloured ex-American president, Donald Trump.”

Jakey (n) – a down-at-heels, worse-for-wear vagrant with an alcohol dependency. The alcohol in question is usually either Buckfast Tonic Wine or Carlsberg Special Brew. The Scottish-based bestselling author J.K. Rowling is sometimes referred to as ‘Jakey Rowling’ by Scottish-independence enthusiasts, irritated at her high-profile support for Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom during the 2014 independence referendum.

Janny (n) – a janitor. In Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000), hailed (22 years before Deep Wheel Orcadia) as the first-ever science-fiction novel written in Scots, the main character works as a cyberjanny, ‘cleaning up social middens in cyberspace’.

Jag (n/v) – variously, the painful pricking sensation you get when you touch a thistle-head; a needle-and-syringe injection; a serving of whisky, as in “Wid ye like a wee jag ay Grouse?”; or a supporter of Partick Thistle Football Club, the third football team in Glasgow whose mascot, Kingsley, is the most terrifying sporting mascot in the world. The adjective derived from jag is jaggy. Yes, Kingsley is the world’s jaggiest sporting mascot too.

© Partick Thistle Football Club

Jalouse (v) – to suspect.

Jaup (v) – ‘to splash or spatter’, according to my well-thumbed copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary. Like a lot of Scots words, I heard this one, or a vowel-altered variation of it, before I even moved to Scotland. While I was living in Northern Ireland as a wee boy, and whenever my mother was frying something in the kitchen, she’d bark at me: “Stay back or ye’ll be japped by the pan!”

Jiggered (adj) – exhausted.

Jing–bang (n) – the lot or ‘every last one’, as in the phrase, “the whole jing-bang ay them”.

© D.C. Thomson

Jings! (exclamation) – a mild and very old-fashioned expression of surprise in Scotland. Nowadays, in fact, I suspect there is just one person in Scotland who still says “Jings!” That is Oor Wullie, the dungaree-clad, bristly-haired juvenile delinquent from the Sunday Post comic strip of the same name.

Jobby (n) – a turd. A word much loved by Billy Connolly, as in his routine about the mechanism that expels faecal matter underneath airplane toilets, the jobby–wheecher. (Wheech means to remove something quickly and suddenly.) Incidentally, another Scottish term for excrement found in this region of the alphabet is keech.

Jouk (v) – to duck or dodge. A nice story I’ve heard is that this word found its way to the American south. There, a juke joint became a roughhouse dancing venue where people had to keep jouking this way and that to avoid punches, bottles, etc., thrown on the dance floor. In turn, this led to the machines that played records of the music you heard at such places being called jukeboxes.

From unspash.com / © Max Tcvetkov

Keek (v) – to peep or glance at something. The derivative keeker refers not, as you might expect, to a peeping Tom, but to a black eye.

Ken (v) – to know. Meanwhile, the adjective kenspeckle means ‘well-known’.

Kent yer faither! (idiom) – “(I) knew your father!” In other words, “Don’t give yourself airs and graces because you’re from humble stock, same as the rest of us.” I’ve never heard anyone use this as a putdown, but I’ve heard several folk over the years complain about kent–yer–faither syndrome in Scotland. They felt Scotland was a place where if you managed to improve yourself and be successful, you then had to deal with a bunch of jealous, moaning gits trying to cut you down to size.

Kirk (n) – with a capital ‘K’, the Kirk refers to the Church of Scotland, i.e., the institution representing the country’s once-dominant Presbyterian faith. With a small ‘k’, a kirk refers to a church building. In 2008, when George Takei, who played Mr Sulu in the original series of Star Trek (1966-69), married his long-term partner Brad Altman and invited all the surviving members of the Star Trek cast to his wedding, except for William Shatner, whom he famously disliked, a joke about this circulated in Scotland. The punchline went: “The Kirk doesn’t approve of gay marriage anyway.”

From wikipedia.org / © NBC

Laldy (n) – ‘your all’. The expression “Gie it laldy!” has been bellowed from the touchline of many a Scottish sports field.

Leid (n) – a language. Thus, this entry is about the ‘gid Scots leid’.

Links (n) – defined in the Free Dictionary as ‘relatively flat or undulating sandy turf-covered ground usually along a seashore.’ A links can also refer to a golf course positioned on such terrain. For example, eastern Edinburgh has Leith Links and Fife has Lundin Links. In fact, Ruth Davidson, the tank-loving honorary colonel who used to lead the Scottish Conservative Party, was ennobled not so long ago and she chose for herself the title of ‘Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links’. Although I prefer to call her: ‘Her Royal Highness Baroness Colonel Tank-Commander Ruth Davidson of Jar-Jar Binks’.

Loon (n) – a word common in North-East Scotland, equivalent to laddie, just as the North-Eastern quine is equivalent to lassie. When I was out drinking as a young guy in Aberdeen, my Aberdonian pal George Boardman would cheerily cry at the end of the evening, “See ye later, loon!”

Loup (v) – to jump.

Lugs (n) – ears. I’ve heard more than one person, after being subjected to someone else’s haranguing or moaning, retort: “Quit burnin ma lugs!”

Lum (n) – a chimney. Some years ago, the Guardian reviewed a collection of short stories by the late Scottish author Alasdair Gray and the reviewer complained about the number of typos in the book. He cited as an example ‘Edinburgh lums’, which he assumed was a misprint of ‘Edinburgh slums’. But no, Gray was actually referring to the smoky chimneys of the Scottish capital.

February 4, 2022February 15, 2022

Branagh’s Belfast

Kenneth Branagh has seemed the embodiment of classical, theatrical Englishness for a long time – at least since his 1989 film adaptation of Henry V, in which he raged “Cry ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!’” Meanwhile, over the years, I’ve enjoyed shocking people by pointing out to them that Branagh isn’t actually English. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1960. He and his family left there for England in 1969, shortly after the outbreak of the Troubles. He ended up in Berkshire, where he dropped his Belfast accent and ‘acquired received pronunciation to avoid bullying.’ Thus began the plummy-voiced Branagh we know today.

In fact, Branagh’s early life wasn’t dissimilar to mine, for I was born and brought up in Northern Ireland until the age of 11, when my family moved to the town of Peebles, in the Borders region of Scotland. I was a couple of years older than Branagh was at the time of moving and couldn’t shed my accent so easily – not that I needed to, because although my new classmates in Peebles sometimes took the piss out of the way I spoke, I was never bullied. Come to think of it, acquiring ‘received pronunciation to avoid bullying’ probably wouldn’t have been a good policy at Peebles High School. Folk would have picked on you more for sounding like a posh tosser.

Before Branagh made a name for himself as the star, director and adaptor of Henry V, I’d known of his Northern Irish connections because I’d seen him appear in a quartet of TV plays written by the Northern Irish dramatist Graham Reid. These were Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982), A Matter of Choice for Billy (1983), A Coming to Terms for Billy (1984) and Lorna (1987), and were about the tribulations of a working-class Protestant family in Belfast, the Martins. The Martins’ problems aren’t caused by the Troubles but by their own flawed, damaged and abrasive personalities. The widowed father Norman (James Ellis) is an unrepentant hard man, incapable of showing his gentler feelings, while his eldest child and only son Billy (Branagh) is embittered about how Norman treated his late mother. It’s left to the eldest daughter, the mild-mannered Lorna (Brid Brennan), to act as a surrogate mother to the family’s younger children. During the plays, unexpected things happen – Norman mellows under the influence of a woman he forms a relationship with while working in England, Lorna develops some unexpected steel and Billy, dismayingly, begins to show some of the worst traits of his dad. In the four plays Branagh had no problem readopting his old Belfast accent, so I was surprised when a few years later I went to the cinema and heard him speaking fluent Shakespeare in Henry V.

Branagh has revisited his Belfast roots with his latest movie Belfast, which was released in the USA last year and has just been released in Britain. Inspired by Branagh’s experiences during the late 1960s, it tells the story of another working-class Protestant family, one less dysfunctional than the Martins in the Billy plays: a couple simply entitled ‘Ma’ (Catriona Balfe) and ‘Pa’ (Jamie Dornan), and their older son Will (Lewis McAskie) and younger son Buddy (Jude Hill). Pa spends his working life in England and is considering moving his family over to live with him, something that doesn’t appeal to Ma and the boys. “I know nothing else but Belfast,” she protests. For one thing, they have strong family ties in the city, most notably Pa’s parents, the droll Pop (Ciaran Hines) and stern but kindly Granny (Judi Dench). Then the Troubles erupt and Protestant paramilitaries led by local thug Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) chase the Catholic families out of their neighbourhood. As the paramilitaries’ grip on the area tightens, Pa falls foul of Clanton and it becomes clear that, like it or not, his family will have to leave too.

This basic plot could have made Belfast a grim film, but it’s a funny, good-natured one because these events are seen through the eyes of little Buddy. They have to compete for attention with all the things that matter to a normal nine-year-old boy – things ranging from pursuing your first love to getting initiated into the local kids’ gang, from making trips to the cinema to bonding with your granddad.

Belfast left me with mixed emotions. On one hand, I found it annoyingly overstated in places. On the other, I generally found it rather moving. I’ll explain my conflicting reactions in detail, starting with the negative ones.

I have to admit that until now Henry V is the only film by Branagh that I’ve enjoyed. I wasn’t impressed by his later adaptations of Shakespeare, like Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), and I hated his version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). They seemed shrill and over-the-top in both their acting and their visuals. Originally, I thought this was because Branagh didn’t have confidence in the original texts by Shakespeare and Shelley to capture the attention of modern film audiences. He felt obliged to make them as bombastic as possible, pumping them up with the cinematic equivalent of steroids – operatic performances, hammy humour, fast-moving camerawork and so on. Nowadays, though, I just think the problem is that Branagh, basically, is a theatrical man. When you’re on a stage, performing for a live audience, everything has to be big – the voice projection, the gestures, the general drama – in order to be seen and heard. But what’s effective from a distant stage often seems unsubtle when it’s projected in fine detail onto a large movie screen. And that’s the impression I sometimes got with Belfast.

In its plot machinations, visuals and soundtrack, there are some broad brushstrokes indeed. You get heavy-handed pieces of comedy, such as when Buddy cheats at his homework in order to get placed at the desk beside the girl he fancies at school – their teacher positions the pupils from the front to the back of the classroom according to how good or bad their marks are, and Buddy’s sweetheart, the brightest kid in class, is right at the front. (From a teaching point of view, wouldn’t it be sensible to have the less able kids at the front, so you can keep a close eye on them, and the smart ones at the back?)

Meanwhile, Branagh shoots the film in black and white but inserts colour at certain moments. These are when Buddy’s family go to the cinema. Although the auditorium is filmed in monochrome, what’s happening on the screen – action from Hammer’s One Million Years BC (1966) and the movie version of Roald Dahl’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) – appears in its original, glorious technicolour. As a metaphor for how the cinema transports Buddy out of his black-and-white everyday existence and into the colourful dreamworld of the movies, this is pretty clunking.

By far the worst offender, though, is a scene where Pa confronts Billy Clanton on a street. Clanton is holding his family at gunpoint and there’s a squad of British Army soldiers looking on, pointing weapons at everybody. I know we’re meant to be viewing this through Buddy’s eyes. But still, it seems crass and cheesy that at this deadly-serious moment Tex Ritter starts singing Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling from the classic 1952 western High Noon – which Buddy has recently watched on TV – on the soundtrack. Billy Clanton, incidentally, was the name of one of the villainous Clanton Gang who took on the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday during the gunfight at the OK Corral, another touch that’s a bit too obvious.

All that aside, however, I have to say I enjoyed Belfast. It’s nice to see a film about Northern Ireland that isn’t primarily about terrorism, extreme religion or extreme politics, and that focuses on believable, relatable people who are just trying to get on with their lives. It also contains a lot of humour, something that’s usually in short supply in movies about Northern Ireland, even though I remember knowing many funny, witty characters when I lived there. (Ciaran Hines’ genial, good-hearted Pop, who manages to be on Buddy’s wavelength without ever patronising him, initially seemed too good to be true – but again, I realised, I’d known several old guys like him during my childhood.)

Branagh conveys the idea that, as a kid in Northern Ireland, the popular culture of the time enthused you just as it enthused kids in more ‘normal’ societies, and influenced you as much as (if not more than) the riots and bombings that were happening not far from your doorstep. Thus, we see Buddy dressing up like a cast-member of Thunderbirds (1965-66), watching Star Trek (1966-69), playing with Subbuteo and James Bond toy cars, and reading the Marvel comic The Mighty Thor, which allows Branagh to sneakily reference the 2011 movie Thor, which he directed. (I don’t know how easy it was to access Marvel comics in Belfast in 1969, especially as Marvel’s British subsidiary Marvel UK didn’t begin operating until 1972. Still, I remember finding an American edition of The Avengers in Enniskillen in the early 1970s, so I guess it was possible.)

If there’s one thing I find unconvincing about the characters, it’s that the tribal symbols that existed in Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities, even in 1969 before the Troubles hardened people’s senses of identity, are absent. There’s little said or shown about being British or Irish, about Union Jacks or tricolours, about the Orange Order or Gaelic Athletics Association. Actually, at a few points Buddy’s relatives describe themselves as ‘Irish’ (“The Irish were born for leaving – otherwise, the rest of the world would have no pubs…” “All the Irish need to survive is a phone, a Guinness and the sheet music to Danny Boy…”), although I expect most Belfast Protestants would call themselves ‘British’. Compare this with a scene in Graham Reid’s A Coming to Terms for Billy when Norman Martin’s two youngest daughters discuss, unenthusiastically, the prospect of their dad taking them to England. When one points out how disliked the Irish are in England, the other retorts, “We’re not Irish. We’re Protestants!”

Still, Belfast definitely shows that Branagh’s heart is in the right place even if, occasionally, his plotting and filmmaking instincts aren’t. The black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous and his use of classic Van Morrison songs on the soundtrack – Warm Love, Jackie Wilson Said, Bright Side of the Road, Days Like This, Carrickfergus and, inevitably at the end, The Healing has Begun – is a reminder that however much Van the Man has degenerated these days into a curmudgeonly, whinging old fart who’d pick a fight with his own shadow, he did, once upon a time, record some wonderful music.

And, ultimately, Branagh shows that despite the terrible things that have gone on there, Northern Ireland is a place that exerts a powerful hold on your affections. This is illustrated in the scene where Ma and Pa break the news to Buddy that they’re all going to leave Belfast and move to England. Poor Buddy promptly bursts into tears.

I remember when my mother took me aside in 1976 and told me that we were going to move to Scotland. I reacted in exactly the same way.