I’D REALLY wanted to love Blonde Fist, writer and director Frank Clarke’s 1990s Kirkby tale, starring his sister Margi and now released on DVD for the first time.

After all, it’s Merseyside-set (with a dollop of NYC), written and directed by Clarke, the man who wrote the brilliant Letter to Brezhnev and has a cast full of local actors, many of whom have gone on to huge acclaim – spot a very young Stephen Graham in early scenes.

But I’m afraid it’s just not that good, with the indefatigable Margi far and away the best thing about it.

She plays Kirkby single mother Ronnie O’Dowd, who ends up in prison after using her impressive boxing ability (inherited from her fist-fighter father) to put straight the DSS clerk who has stolen her fella (Gary Mavers).

There she tackles the prison bully to similar effect before fears of her son being placed in care lead to a prison break-out and an escape to New York.

She tracks down her “tycoon” father in NYC who turns out to be a down-and-out alcoholic and embarks on a boxing career to try to earn enough to bring them both home.

The guts of the story could have been quite good, but there is too much dependence on cliché. Clarke’s script is clunky with just the occasional decent one-liner and the direction even worse, at times bordering on the amateurish, while a few of the bit-part actors come close to pantomime.

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500 Great Goals (Exempt)

IT IS part of the great joy of football that goals come along so infrequently, allowing that ecstatic release of emotion that every fan craves. So it is then that goal compilations such as this can sometimes loss their impact as balls fly into nets from all directions.

But the sheer variety of goals on offer here, stretching from domestic games to European competitions and international football, and from current players right back to old black and white footage, keeps things pretty fresh.

The goals are split into 5 discs, with 100 goals on each, with the voiceover putting each goal into some form of context, although at times you would like more of this. There is also the occasional talking head to break things up, from Pele to Sir Alex Ferguson. You never quite know what's coming next as the goals seem completely selected at random, so a World Cup effort will be followed with something from Division 2, and one suspects it is most probably down to the footage available to the compilersrather than anything else. There are some familiar strikes on show here, so you'll find efforts from Maradona, Pele, Gascoigne and Best but there are plenty of cracking efforts that you'll probably have forgotten from lesser lights of the game. They are not all "great" goals but it's a thoroughly enjoyable selection nonetheless. One to help fill the barren summer months ahead.

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