Latest news with #Tom
South Wales Guardian
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- South Wales Guardian
Dylan Thomas Boathouse in Laugharne hosts its first wedding
The Dylan Thomas Boathouse in Laugharne, once home to the celebrated Welsh poet, hosted its first ceremony on June 21, 2025, in a setting overlooking the Taf estuary. The newlyweds, Megan and Tom, became the first couple to marry at the site, signing the register in Dylan Thomas's iconic Writing Shed. Cllr Hazel Evans, Carmarthenshire County Council's cabinet member for regeneration, leisure, culture and tourism, said: "We're very thankful to Megan and Tom for choosing the Dylan Thomas Boathouse for their special day. "We couldn't have asked for a happier or more generous couple to inaugurate the museum as a wedding venue. "The museum makes a perfect venue for intimate weddings and celebrations and offers a unique blend of warmth and historic charm in a stunning location." The Boathouse is now part of a wider project led by CofGâr, Carmarthenshire County Council's museums and arts service, in collaboration with Carmarthenshire Registrars, to offer bespoke wedding and celebrant packages at some of the county's most distinctive venues. Other locations include the Museum of Land Speed and Parc Howard Museum. Cllr Evans said: "We're looking forward to continuing our partnership with the registrars service to deliver many more special occasions at CofGâr museums in the future." Couples interested in booking a wedding or special event at one of the venues can contact CofGâr by email at info@ or by calling 01267 228696.
Irish Independent
4 hours ago
- Business
- Irish Independent
From fast food to community hub: Kerry bar hoping to spark local revival
Enter Tom McQuinn of The Halfway Bar in Ballymac, and it's he who is the brainchild behind the recent rejuvenation of his own little corner of the parish, including a brand-new food truck that Laura will be helping to officially launch this Saturday, July 26, from 5 pm to 7.30pm. Speaking to The Kerryman, Tom said that the idea of opening up the new food truck was borne out of a number of things — the first being financial necessity, as well as his own experience in fast food and his desire to stop people from having to trek to Tralee or Castleisland anytime they wanted a takeaway. "The model of a country bar standing on its own and hoping for punters to come in is traditionally gone. The model doesn't work anymore. As a result, I had to do something to see if we could generate interest in the place," he said, adding that he's an ex-McDonald's man who was the opening manager of the McDonald's in Tralee back in 1996. "I have a history in fast food, and so that was my idea for a long time — to get something like the food truck going. We are the halfway point between Tralee and Castleisland – they're about 9 to 10 km in either direction – and so that gives us a good geographical location to work with,' he continued. It's a case of "so far, so good," Tom said, with business going steadily so far. "With a bit of luck, we'll generate revenue from the food truck, and hopefully this will help to boost the bar as well.' As for what's on the menu, Tom said that it's still early days, so for now they're sticking with the tried and trusted: burgers, chips, chicken, and pizzas. He added, though, that they are open to any and all suggestions and that they will ultimately be guided by what the customer wants. The new food truck aside, Tom and his team have been busy coming up with a number of initiatives to help keep Ballymac a vibrant place for local residents — the result being the recent installation of a new post box outside the bar/shop, with stamps and envelopes on sale there too. As the talk moved on to the installation of the new post box, Tom said the idea for this ultimately came about through a stroke of fortune. After the old post box went out of action before Christmas, people were suddenly turning up at The Halfway Bar — which was the nearest outlet — to enquire (and give out, Tom joked) about postal services nearby. After this went on for a few weeks, Tom saw it as an opportunity to set up a post box at the shop. As well as this, stamps and envelopes are sold through the shop. In addition, people can even come and pay their bills there too. When it's put to him that his bar is almost becoming like the go-to hub for anything and everything the community might need, he laughed and said that's the ultimate goal. "In an ideal world, that's what we'd love!' he said.
Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Unforgivable on BBC2: Shocking but powerful, this was even tougher to watch than Adolescence
Don't say you weren't warned. As if the title weren't stark enough, the opening scene of Unforgivable served notice that writer Jimmy McGovern was intent on piling horrors upon miseries. Anna Friel, as harassed single mother Anna McKinney, arrived at her teenage son's school to be informed the boy had broken another pupil's jaw. We never learned why, because Tom was refusing to speak. While she was pleading with the head teacher not to suspend her son, Anna's father phoned to say her mother had just died. Far worse was to come, as she discovered her estranged brother, Joe, was about to be released from prison on probation - after serving his sentence for sexually abusing Tom. Traumatic family dramas that tackle deeply upsetting, taboo topics are dominating the market for serious television this year, following the success of Adolescence on Netflix. But Adolescence featured the familiar elements of a police thriller, with gripping interviews that slowly led us to a shocking truth. Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured, played a nun, Katherine, who gave Joe a room in a hostel for repentant sex offenders, and tried to help him come to terms with his past Unforgivable was much more difficult to watch. We discovered early on that Joe (Bobby Schofield) really had groomed and assaulted the boy, and that the grief and shame of it had driven his mother to an early grave. Bare backside of the night It's been quite a week for naked behinds on telly. After the acres of rear ends in BBC1's The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Danny Dyer discarded his bath towel on Mr Bigstuff (Sky Max). But did he use a stand-in? Was that a stunt bottom? The courage Schofield must have needed to play this part is remarkable. Gradually, we realised Joe had experienced abuse himself as a boy, at the hands of the local football coach who was also a family friend. As he unburdened himself of this secret to therapists, he wept and shook with self-loathing - earning a degree of sympathy, but never becoming likeable. It was a powerfully brave performance, but Joe remained sullen, self-pitying, manipulative and disloyal, unable to think of anything but the suffering he had both caused and endured. Anna Maxwell Martin played a nun, Katherine, who gave him a room in a hostel for repentant sex offenders, and tried to help him come to terms with his past. When she revealed she had breast cancer, he seemed barely interested. McGovern didn't seem to care that much either: we learned next to nothing about her treatment or her prognosis. Given the general tone of despair throughout the hour-and-three-quarters of the one-off episode, I suspect it didn't end well for her. The only note of hope was that Joe's father, Brian (David Threlfall), lived to the end of the story. That never seemed likely: grey-faced and breathless, he looked like a heart attack dressed up in a shirt and trousers. Threlfall is used to making himself look ill for roles. For nine years, he played the walking cadaver Frank Gallagher in Shameless. It's an odd thing that, however sick and seedy his characters appear, Threlfall always survives to the credits... whereas Sean Bean, the epitome of burly Northern health, is invariably killed off. Work that one out.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Anna Friel steals every scene in Jimmy McGovern's Unforgivable
Liverpool-born TV luminary Jimmy McGovern first rose to prominence – after a stint on soaps like Brookside and Corrie – with Cracker, a detective series starring Robbie Coltrane as a misanthropic criminal psychologist. Since then, he has become the great chronicler of Britain's ills. From the Hillsborough disaster to the Iraq war, via inquisitions on joint enterprise, unemployment, and disability cuts, he has run the gamut of social failings. And a recurring theme, running from 1994's Priest to 2017's Broken, is the legacy of child abuse, a subject he explores in profound detail, again, in BBC Two's Unforgivable. Joe Mitchell (Bobby Schofield) is in prison, having been found guilty of sexually assaulting his 12-year-old nephew, Tom (Austin Haynes). Tom's mother, Anna (Anna Friel), struggles with Tom's increasingly erratic behaviour, while grieving for her and Joe's mother, who has just died. When Joe is released from prison, he is offered a second chance by a group of Christians, led by Katherine (Anna Maxwell Martin), who believe in rehabilitation and offer Joe a chance to, if not start again, resume some sort of quotidian existence. 'Isn't forgiveness selfish?' she asks Joe, as they explore how he can rejoin society. But Joe isn't really looking for absolution; he's looking for answers. And here, the long, multi-generational shadow of abuse casts its shade. 'No one's perfect,' family friend Paul (Mark Womack) consoles Anna's widower father Brian (David Threlfall), who, in addition to losing his wife, is estranged from his paedophile son and watching his daughter's family life disintegrate. In a way, he's right. All of McGovern's characters are dealing with the fractured messiness of life (even Maxwell Martin's God-botherer has breast cancer, 'the nun's disease'). This panoply of personal disasters gives rise to some brilliant acting from the assembled ensemble of McGovern regulars. Schofield is transformed from his roles in This City Is Ours and SAS: Rogue Heroes, imbuing Joe with a magnetic, itching discomfort. Friel, meanwhile, steals every scene she's in as a desperate, but still poised, mother. The material is red meat to fine actors, and they eat it up. Whether it's so nourishing to audiences is debatable. There is no challenging McGovern's willingness to gaze into the abyss – he has been doing it for more than 30 years now – but is the abyss gazing back? As it progresses, Unforgivable tries to engage with the cyclical nature of abuse ('Some men who abuse have themselves been abused,' Katherine informs Joe) but ends up feeling simplified and rushed. A complex, nuanced narrative that might've stretched over the course of a multi-episode mini-series is, here, condensed into 105 minutes. Joe's dual role – as both victim and abuser – is one that oscillates, the very instability of its nature forming the crux of how these crimes are perpetrated and then covered up. But the constraints of the plot dumb this down somewhat, and the narrative becomes increasingly procedural. 'I could cope with the lying,' Joe laments, as he picks at old wounds. 'But all this truth? It's too much for me.' McGovern has worked with non-fiction in the past (Sunday, for example, is about Bloody Sunday), but more often he builds, like Ken Loach, stories as composites of abstracted case studies. At its best, this approach adds an intimacy that true life portraits can struggle with, where the interiority is limited by the strictures of fact. But, at other times, it can feel like these characters are only being imagined into life in order to put them through intense suffering. Unforgivable is undoubtedly a sympathetic piece – even Joe is afforded a reluctant dignity – but it is also a concatenation of personal miseries. Sunlight, it seems, doesn't often fall on Merseyside. For some, it will be enough simply to give these tough issues an airing. 'Important' is an easy adjective to apply to a McGovern drama. But for viewers to endure a couple of hours of fairly unrelenting gloom, there needs to be a spark beyond great performances and plausible writing. Unforgivable feels like an endurance test, whose message – that empathy must prevail – could've been expressed with more dynamic light and shade.
The Guardian
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Unforgivable review – Jimmy McGovern's mesmeric new drama is even better than Adolescence
f'We pray for it every day, but it's man's will that gets done, not God's.' Thus speaks a former nun, pretty much an emblematic character of a Jimmy McGovern drama, delivering an emblematic line. McGovern has always been a chronicler of pressing social issues, from police incompetence and corruption (Hillsborough) to government failures and cover-ups (Sunday, Reg), class struggle (Dockers), disability (Go Now), religious hypocrisy (Priest, Broken), violence (Anthony, Time) and the brokenness of systems supposedly set up to help our most vulnerable (Care). But whatever the issue under examination and – usually – excoriation, there is the profounder concern of how far from grace we have fallen. From there, McGovern asks: what would it take for us to rise again? His latest creation, Unforgivable, takes child sexual abuse as its subject. McGovern has brought together trusted members of, in effect, the repertory company he has gathered over the years – including Annas Friel and Maxwell Martin – to tell the story of an ordinary family trying to cope with the aftermath of a terrible act; the abuse of a young teenager, Tom (Austin Haynes), by his uncle Joe (Bobby Schofield, playing the character as unmonstrously as he is written, making his actions and the ramifications all the more awful for it). Tom is now getting into trouble at school and is virtually mute, answering only yes or no to direct questions, and Joe is about to be released from his short spell in prison. Tom's mother – Joe's sister – Anna (Friel, in an absolutely wonderful performance) is a mass of rage, despair and shock, with no time to process any of it as she fights to keep her job, her inevitably neglected other son out of trouble and Tom from descending further into mental ill health. Anna and Joe's mother dies soon after the story begins and the first moral quandary arises – should he be allowed to attend her funeral? Would she – the only family member to visit him in prison – have wanted it? Their father, Brian (David Threlfall), forbids Joe to come. When Anna later bumps into Joe in the cemetery, in breach of his licence, she reports him to his parole officer, who redraws the boundaries of the exclusion zone rather than recall him to prison. What would you have done? Small questions pave the way for larger ones. Where do you stand on the fact that, as Anna points out in fury, Joe has had access to copious amounts of therapy in prison and now lives in a special halfway-house-cum-rehab-facility, run by a former nun, Katherine (Maxwell Martin), while Tom has had nothing? McGovern's work is always grounded in detail, especially that relating to systemic inadequacies; we sit with Anna through the GP's explanation that there is a 21-week waiting list for even 'the worst' children to be seen. It takes a suicide attempt to get Tom even that far. Eventually, we move to the question inherent in the title: can Joe be forgiven? How much weight do we give his assertions of self-loathing? Should we feel touched by his apparent remorse? Should Anna? How much should Brian let love for his son govern his actions when the rest of his family has been devastated? When it emerges that Joe was abused at the same age as Tom, it is not a plot twist to sway our sympathies – McGovern is an unsentimental and unmanipulative writer – but to force us to think more deeply. Does it make him less culpable for his actions? Or more damnable, because he knew the effect one act can have on a life? His abuser also harmed others who did not perpetuate the cycle, so what do we do with that knowledge? Space is left for any conclusion. None of us knows God's will, whether you believe in him or not. Unforgivable has none of the agitprop that can creep into McGovern's always impassioned work and there are faultless performances throughout, including from Mark Womack, a sleeper agent of an actor who delivers invariably to mesmeric effect. It is an altogether richer, more subtle and more sophisticated creation than, say, Adolescence, to which it is likely to be compared; as such, it is unlikely to be adopted as a pseudo policy document by the government. More's the pity. It has an immeasurable sorrow at its heart and offers no answers. It leaves you feeling that this is exactly as it should be; exactly as it must be. Unforgivable aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer now
