Alun Armstrong has been playing salt-of-the-earth north-eastern types since at least the days of Get Carter, a film made as long ago as 1971. Here in Michael Chaplin’s ongoing The Ferryhill Philosophers (4 February), he features as sixtysomething Joseph Snowball, a handyman-cum-mature philosophy student whose conversations with his tutor Hermione have begun to assume an uncomfortably personal focus.The problem was Joe’s mother, Bella (Anne Reid), fast approaching her eighty-eighth birthday, and now adding incipient blindness to her list of afflictions. Amid a riot of pungent Wearside argot, much of it courtesy of Joe (“Me mam loved that fil-um …” he observed when Hermione quoted from The Sound of Music), it became clear that Mrs Snowball, disdaining the neat
11 February 2016, The Tablet
It’s the meaning of life, pet
Get Instant Access
Continue Reading
Register for free to read this article in full
Subscribe for unlimited access
From just £30 quarterly
Complete access to all Tablet website content including all premium content.
The full weekly edition in print and digital including our 179 years archive.
PDF version to view on iPad, iPhone or computer.
Already a subscriber? Login