Getting Radical

It's rare I feel any sort of keenness to watch a movie, but I'd love a chance to watch Mike Leigh's Peterloo. Mind you, any Mike Leigh movie is more than acceptable in this household. (Surprisingly the Missus loved Secrets and Lies, a sign of her unerring good taste.) I doubt very much the great director's account of the massacre that happened in the city of my birth will make it to these shores, but his brilliant account of Turner's life turned up on one of the Starhub channels to which we have access, so there's some hope there.

The Peterloo massacre mildly haunted my teenage years - I used to hang out in the Central Library near the site - and has, if anything, grown in significance in my mind. I'm firmly on the side of the tradition of Radical Dissent in historical terms and recent events in the nation of my birth have confirmed this essential sympathy all the more. There's a well-argued opinion piece in everyone's favourite sort-of-left-of-centre publication on-line going by the unwieldy but worthy title: Peterloo shaped modern Britain, as much as any king or queen did that pretty much says it all for me. Nice to see the great E.P. Thompson getting name-checked in there. Hope he's still read in the academies. He should be.