The ‘rollercoaster' career of NI music legend George Jones – from providing ‘an oasis' in the Troubles to a ‘tragic year'
Music and broadcasting legend George Jones has by his own admission been on a 'rollercoaster' journey and said he feels bring happiness to others is what he has 'been guided to do with my life'.
That realisation has come having found religion and looking back on a past well lived which has seen him wear all manner of hats – musician, comedian, broadcaster and more latterly artist and Christian.
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South Wales Guardian
a day ago
- South Wales Guardian
The Traitors winner Harry Clark announces debut memoir focused on his faith
The 24-year-old won the second series of the hit BBC show, which sees a group of 'faithfuls' attempt to banish the 'traitors', who murder during the night-time, in order to win a prize pot of up to £120,000. Staying Faithful is slated for release this autumn and will recount Clark's formative years serving in the British Army, before his reality TV fame, along with how his Christian faith has and continues to guide him through his life. Speaking about the release, Clark said: 'Faith has always been important to me. 'It's the blueprint to everything I do, it helped me when I was younger, it guided me when I served in the British Army, every day I'm thankful that I'm part of something bigger outside of myself.' The reality star and former British Army engineer took home £95,150 in the 2024 series of The Traitors, after deceiving his friend Mollie Pearce. An average of 5.5 million people tuned in to watch the dramatic finale that crowned Clark as the series two winner. He recently also starred in the seventh season of BBC Two's Pilgrimage: The Road Through The Alps, where he joined six celebrities on a 300km pilgrimage through the Austrian and Swiss Alps to Einsiedeln Abbey as they discussed their different faiths and beliefs. Clark previously opened up to the PA news agency about how the pilgrimage changed him for good and why he thinks people need to talk about faith more openly. He said: 'People think you can't talk about religion – especially the youth – because there's something wrong with it, or it seems like if you believe in one particular religion, you hate all others. But that's not what it is. It doesn't have to be that deep. 'Everyone makes it so serious. If you believe, you believe. If you don't believe, you don't have to, and it's not the end of the world.' Clark also stars in the new series of Channel 4's Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, which sees recruits endure special forces training in an attempt to make it through to the end. He is joined by former Premier League footballer Troy Deeney, Strictly Come Dancing 2025 runner-up Tasha Ghouri, singer Lucy Spraggan, and ex-Love Island contestants Chloe Burrows and Adam Collard. The memoir will be published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), a charity and independent Christian publisher founded in 1698. The SPCK has also published a range of Bibles, guides to faith, academic texts and books for children with the aim of serving readers 'at every stage of the Christian journey'. Staying Faithful will be published on September 30.
Leader Live
a day ago
- Leader Live
The Traitors winner Harry Clark announces debut memoir focused on his faith
The 24-year-old won the second series of the hit BBC show, which sees a group of 'faithfuls' attempt to banish the 'traitors', who murder during the night-time, in order to win a prize pot of up to £120,000. Staying Faithful is slated for release this autumn and will recount Clark's formative years serving in the British Army, before his reality TV fame, along with how his Christian faith has and continues to guide him through his life. Speaking about the release, Clark said: 'Faith has always been important to me. 'It's the blueprint to everything I do, it helped me when I was younger, it guided me when I served in the British Army, every day I'm thankful that I'm part of something bigger outside of myself.' The reality star and former British Army engineer took home £95,150 in the 2024 series of The Traitors, after deceiving his friend Mollie Pearce. An average of 5.5 million people tuned in to watch the dramatic finale that crowned Clark as the series two winner. He recently also starred in the seventh season of BBC Two's Pilgrimage: The Road Through The Alps, where he joined six celebrities on a 300km pilgrimage through the Austrian and Swiss Alps to Einsiedeln Abbey as they discussed their different faiths and beliefs. Clark previously opened up to the PA news agency about how the pilgrimage changed him for good and why he thinks people need to talk about faith more openly. He said: 'People think you can't talk about religion – especially the youth – because there's something wrong with it, or it seems like if you believe in one particular religion, you hate all others. But that's not what it is. It doesn't have to be that deep. 'Everyone makes it so serious. If you believe, you believe. If you don't believe, you don't have to, and it's not the end of the world.' Clark also stars in the new series of Channel 4's Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, which sees recruits endure special forces training in an attempt to make it through to the end. He is joined by former Premier League footballer Troy Deeney, Strictly Come Dancing 2025 runner-up Tasha Ghouri, singer Lucy Spraggan, and ex-Love Island contestants Chloe Burrows and Adam Collard. The memoir will be published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), a charity and independent Christian publisher founded in 1698. The SPCK has also published a range of Bibles, guides to faith, academic texts and books for children with the aim of serving readers 'at every stage of the Christian journey'. Staying Faithful will be published on September 30.
Edinburgh Reporter
2 days ago
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025 – Between the River and the Sea ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generated no shortage of competing and conflicting narratives and part of the potency of Yousef Sweid's one-man play is that, by dint of his family's multi-faceted background, he is able to bring many of them together. Sweid, 49, a Palestinian-Israeli Christian living in Berlin, has two Jewish-Arab children through his two Israeli-Jewish ex-wives. As he explains: 'We are a completely normal family; an Arab, Palestinian, Jewish, Israeli, Austrian, Romanian, Christian family.' After opening against a soundtrack of a demonstration, courtesy of the Israeli-Brazilian sound designer Thomas Moked Blum, and brandishing a few banners ranging from 'Stop the Islamic terror', in Hebrew, and 'Israeli apartheid' to 'From the river to the sea. Christians, Jews and Muslims will live in peace and harmony', Sweid relaxes into storytelling mode. As a child in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, he was called the Israeli Jewish-sounding Yossi by his Jewish friends at kindergarten and school and introduced himself as such to his Jewish acquaintances, only reverting to Yousef when he studied theatre at Tel Aviv University, where it was trendy to have Arab friends. He says he didn't know he was Arab until a four-year-old Jewish boy at kindergarten called him 'a stinking Arab'. Likewise his father, Sliman, whom he impersonates as an affably shouty, lecturing 'baba', was called Shlomo by his Jewish friends. There's a warm, witty interplay between the two of them, relayed via phonecalls as his father has decamped to Canada, just as there is between him and his teenage son, for whom he assumes a more measured demeanour. Sweid's sensitively relayed sexual fantasies with Carolin, whom he met at a Christian youth group in Haifa, and a more lascivious relationship with Shani, whom he fell for while apple-picking at a kibbutz in the Golan Heights close to Syria, bear testament to the uncertainties inherent in his chameleon character as he writhes around on the stage angsting over how best to present himself to them and their families. Yet it is his son's simpler, idealistic fantasies that lift the play into the stratosphere where hope for a peaceful co-existence between people of different faiths resides. The conflict, where it does feature, is often in the context of Sweid's attempts to define his identity and his place in the world, such as in his description of different types of Palestinians. 'I'm a Palestinian Israeli.' 'You're not a Palestinian-Israeli; you're a Palestinian with an Israeli passport,' he interjects as his father. 'There are Palestinians in Gaza who are starving to death, Palestinians living in Canada… I prefer to call us Arabs, not Palestinians. We are the ones who weren't kicked out [of Israel in 1948],' he continues. The human cost of the Hamas atrocities on October 7, 2023, also feature movingly, while referring to Israel's war with Hamas, he says: 'I don't know if you would call it like that any more.' It's an evocative, nuanced and, at times, darkly humorous performance, co-written by Isabella Sedlak, the director, in which the Arab language – 'it's delicious', says Sweid – has to contend with a downside. As Sweid quips sardonically to his son – who queries whether, given his mixed identity and the conflict he is 'lucky' not to live in Israel – he is 'half-lucky and half-screwed… Here [in Germany] they will fear you because you're Arab and hate you because you are Jewish.' One quibble: it could be argued, not unfairly, that there's a theatrical elephant in the room, insofar as in a play that is about people of different backgrounds living together (or not living together) in peace and harmony the main character's two interfaith marriages have broken down and there's no attempt to examine why. On the face of it, it's not a great advert for peaceful coexistence. But perhaps, as Sweid says on several occasions, it's complicated. Between the River and the Sea Zoo Southside Until Aug 13 (not Aug 10) Like this: Like Related
