Matt Tuckey is a writer from Oldham, England. He covers celebrities, night life, Manchester, fitness, creative writing, social media, psychology and events. Some of this may, in some way, help others. Or maybe it'll just entertain you for a while.
Next up in Rukmini Iyer’s Green Roasting Tin: Quick Cook Leek Orzotto with Asparagus, Hazelnuts & Rocket.
The 3 supermarkets I went to didn’t stock hazelnuts, so I used jalapeno peanuts instead. The leeks also came in a pack of 3, so I bunged in an extra to bulk it up. Asparagus spears came in 500g, not 400, so all that went in.
This one should have taken 30 mins. Took me an hour and 15.
The orzo was the standout ingredient, and I guess it was the stock that brought it to life. The veg, as always, I tolerated. 4.5kg to lose at the time of writing (7/3/25).
Back in the middle of April I wrote this Holiday Fit blog post. My plan was to beat a load of bodyweight exercise records, beat a running record and get my weight down from 80kg to 72.2kg, in time for a holiday in late May. I came home from this yesterday.
Well, I didn’t beat any records. I got down to 74.4 before I flew out to Tenerife. I’ve come back from Tenerife and I’m now 75.6. Well, that isn’t so bad. I could have been more disciplined in the run up to the holiday.
But once I was out there, I drank a lot of cocktails and went to a few restaurants. I still did a fair bit of walking and press ups and sit-ups, but it was far from a boot camp.
So I’m home now, with a ton of blogging to do about the holiday. I had a great time and have tonnes of pictures and videos to share.
I’ve got virtually no food in the house. I’ve had a hearty chicken dinner at my mum’s tonight. My plan – a couple of potatoes and fish fillets notwithstanding - is to fast from this point. It should only take a few days to hit the target weight. I’ll be eating with the family Sunday afternoon anyway, but life gets in the way sometimes.
Either way, I’m looking forward to being able to walk around in my suit trousers looking dapper.
Magna Science Adventure Centre, the former steelworks built in 1915, with its ominous giant metal pillars and brick walls, sits on the outskirts of Rotherham, east of Sheffield, Yorkshire. The location serves as a fittingly ominous backdrop to Horrorcon, a horror movie convention. The family museum hosted the event on 17-18th May. I got Saturday tickets. Cosplay, a short film festival, Q+A panels and photo ops all amalgamate into a horrifyingly fun day.
As I walk in, the ticket scanner machine gives me an Evil Dead 2 quote as it validates.
Hellraiser panel
First panel of the day is a Hellraiser Reunion: Doug Bradley (Pinhead), Ashley Laurence (Kirsty Cotton), Nicholas Vince (Chatterer) and Simon Bamford (Butterball Cenobite) take to the stage in the Face of Steel Theatre to discuss the 1987 horror classic.
COMPARE: What does Clive Barker (Creator of Hellraiser ) mean to you?
SB: Nothing. He’s the sweetest man. Clive Barker is a diamond geezer!
AL: Clive Barker is one of the great loves of my life.
DB: I met him in school. I spent 10 years in theatre working with him. I once saw him sitting in front of the TV, watching Ken Dodd, weeping with laughter. He was the best man at my wedding.
The roaming mic goes out into the audience.
Audience Question: What was your fondest memory of working on Hellraiser?
SB: Clive wanted me to wear these dentures. It makes you constantly salivate. Clive tried them and was dribbling into his hand.
CB: Seeing the chains, blood, guts… and watching Nick salivate. Being thrust up against a wall, and asked to urinate against a wall. Everyone was in hysterics. A happy moment indeed!
AQ: There’s’ a picture from Hellraiser of you wearing a hospital gown that wasn’t in the film.
DB: It depends what’s written on the page. Peter had written ‘Kirsty and Peter are trying to escape. 2 masked figures emerge.’ One asks what they’re doing, and reveals himself to be Pinhead. The crew realised they could do practical effects, but it was regarded as too horrible to show. We completed the scenes but it wasn’t shot, so wasn’t in the movie.
NV: My fondest memory was going to the toilet for the first time (in the prosthetics), being blind.
AL: Someone took their head off and did the can-can.
AQ: Did anyone take a box (the interdimensional portal device) after filming?
AL: I asked, and was laughed at. But Claire (Higgins, Julia) did!
DB: Claire was asked where the earrings were. ‘I have them, darling, they may have fallen into my handbag!’
AQ: Was the film about addiction? To pain, drugs, etc?
NV: It could be an addiction to pain, to love. Julia can’t love without this man. She’s addicted to love, like Robert Palmer.
AL: Trauma bonding.
DB: I’ve always seen it as auto crucifixion. I don’t know, you’ve stumped me. Faust said, ‘I’ve started everything. It’s not enough.’ That’s what the cenobites are doing. It’s never enough. Clive Barker would tell me that Hellraiser 3 was going to be set in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Then I thought, you bastard, you told me that just to tell me I wasn’t going to be in it!
COMPARE: I’ll put the cenobites back in the box! Thanks!
Doug Bradley, Pinhead from Hellraiser
Ralph Ineson
Next to stage: Yorkshire actor turned Hollywood star Ralph Ineson, William from Robert Eggers’ period horror The Witch. Through questions from the compare and the audience, we learn about his inspirations – Pete Postlethwaite is a personal hero of his – and his processes – lots of garlic got him into the character of The Green Knight.
RI: I was falling out of love with acting, then I got the script for The Witch. I read it, and thought it was incredible. The director sent me some magazine images of the film.
COMPARE: The Witch was groundbreaking!
RI: It was marketed as a horror film. It was filmed like a family drama; it didn’t feel like a horror film. We went to Ontario Canada and lived together the whole time. We bonded as a family. To believe the family was torn apart, we have to believe they were together, with a family dynamic.
COMPARE: William fights a goat called Black Phillip. How does that work?
RI: Black Philip was a specific thing: we had 3 dogs for the scene, each trained to do one of three things: one to lie down, one to run. The team had to create horns for my death scene. It put me in ER 3 times.
Ineson lifts up his shirt and shows a tattoo of a goat on his rib.
RI: That was the rib he broke. Then I went to the pub and had goat.
COMPARE: Is it welcoming to be brought back by directors?
RI: Always. I credit Eggers for the 2nd half of my career.
COMPARE: The crew of 1979 movie Alien didn’t come to set on off days as they were freaked out. Do you ever get freaked out by the set?
RI: The First Omen… So many things happened on that. I got bitten by a smelly dog. I thought, oh, there’s something strange going on here. I love horror, and think I’ve got the face for it. I don’t want to just do that, but it works.
COMPARE: Have you ever been asked to change accent to be more posh?
RI: I’ve never been asked, and I’m grateful for it. Because I have an accent, I wouldn’t be considered for certain parts. When I started working in America, I got cast as FBI. Americans don’t hear class in British accents. They don’t judge.
AQ: How do you deal with accents?
RI: It depends how you judge my success with accents! I feel I coped better with American accents.
COMPARE: What are the challenges when using your voice only?
(Ineson voiced Asmodeus in The Pope’s Exorcist.)
RI: Being real. The process is kinda similar. I try to be fresh.
The compare then reads out some random industry names for Ineson to give his perspective.
COMPARE: Steven Spielberg.
RI: I worked with him on Ready Player One. He said, ‘that scene where you’re scratching your nose: your daughter doesn’t like it.’ I said, and you?’ ‘ I fucking love it!’ I thought, that’s fucking Steven Speilberg! I had to read through my notes, because I couldn’t hear a thing he was saying.
COMPARE: Ricky Gervais.
RI: Pain in the arse. Ricky liked to pinch your bum before the take. He makes you laugh, but it works. I wouldn’t like to see him do it on a film set.
COMPARE: Joel Coen.
RI: Lovely guy. He paid me the greatest compliment I’ve ever had, at a convention.
(He doesn’t divulge.)
COMPARE: Jenna Coleman.
RI: Tiny. She came up to my belly button. Lovely girl though.
Horrorcon returns next year for the 11th time.
Predator cosplay
Senator Palpatine cosplay
Killer Klownz from Outer Space cosplay. Great outfit, terrible film
Sprouts get a bad rap. This is the second recipe I’ve cooked that features them, and although I wouldn’t elevate them to ‘favourite veg’ tier, they’re still edible, more so when roasted.
I cooked Crispy Tamarind Sprouts with Peanuts and Shallots from Rukmini Iyer's The Green Roasting Tin book on 25th Feb.
I went to 3 different supermarkets and none of them had mango powder, but there was the option of replacing this with chaat masala, which Tesco had. The recipe took over twice the recommended time, but came out pretty nice. I used coconut yoghurt that wasn’t vegan, as I’ve tried the plant-based alternative before and it was grim. Tamarind was an eye-opening condiment.
Maybe I liked it. I dunno.
Advised prep and cook time was 35 mins. Took me 76.
This week:
Backpacking brand WeRoad returns to Box bar on Deansgate. I won’t be there as I’m laying low from the meetup scene for the moment. I’ll blog on this later. Too busy for one thing.
Back in 2021, as the NHS rolled out the vaccine and lockdown was being lifted, my disability concessionary travel pass expired.
I’d been using the pass, issued by Transport for Greater Manchester (later rebranded as The Bee Network), since 2008 for free travel on buses and trams and it’d been a great help. But then in’21 I just didn’t hear from them. I phoned, emailed, etc. What did they need from me? Normally they just sent me a new one, or at least gave me some application info. But no. Nothing.
I spoke to the bus pass team at my local authority. They backed me up and sent on all the info they’d asked me for – psych assessments, recent medical info from NHS appointments, but… nothing.
The main problem seemed to be that I wasn’t under social care. I had been briefly in 2010/2011, but not since then. I tried to contact TfGM themselves, but I didn’t get far. Nobody seemed to know anything. I’d first got a travel pass long before I was even diagnosed, let alone under social care. What was the issue?
Someone at the Local Authority told me that either they or TfGM had been handing out passes ‘willy nilly’ and that there were far too many being issued, so they were cracking down. That’s as far as I got.
In more recent months, I got involved with Social Prescribing, as I blogged a while ago. One of the things we looked into was travel passes. I’m not sure exactly what we did right this time. Perhaps it was the fact that I was involved with their service. But either way, I applied online without Social Prescribing’s oversight, as far as I can remember. I included my medical info relating to short term memory difficulties… and the pass arrived at the end of March.
Well, that’s good.
Hold up, though. In the past 4 years, there’s been a slight alteration. I’ve read the small print.
‘Where and when you can use your pass. Within Greater Manchester: Travel for free on all buses and Metrolink trams within Greater Manchester between 9:30am and midnight, Monday to Friday, and all day weekends and public holidays. If you travel outside of these times you must pay a full concessionary fare.’
This is different. The pass I had from ’08-’21 was valid 24hrs a day. Why this change? I wouldn’t have been able to use it to get to work, starting at 8:40.
I started driving to work in the early days of lockdown, so I’ve not used many buses since then.
I’ve used the travel pass on public transport recently without incident, and should be able to until 2028. It’s a small win, and we take them where we find them. It’s all you can do. I think I have Social Prescribing to thank for that.
The first of 2 Liverpool conventions this year, the May run of Comic Con Liverpool was loaded with Hollywood stars of today and yesterday. I got tickets for the Sunday, just before the 40,000-strong venue of Exhibition Centre Liverpool sold out, along with a few photo ops.
One arena inside ECL, presumably a sports hall, featured a stage with a Blues Brothers tribute band and some of the guests.
Ricco Ross, Frost in Aliens. One of the first casualties in the hive. He liked my t shirt.
Exhibition Centre Liverpool is a vast, multi-room, sprawling venue, so there’s no way you could fit everyone into the main hall for the panels. I gather these are ticketed like the photos. These Q+A sessions are broadcast around the building on the TVs. I found a spot near the photo areas to watch the Starship Troopers panel on the screens, and plonked myself down surrounded by the cosplayers and people queueing for photos.
DM: We thought it would do better sooner. It didn’t have the reputation we’d like, but over time…
CVD: in The States, they’d watch Mr Bean, then sneak in to see Starship Troopers. It made $23 million. People bought tickets to see The Little Mermaid.
MI: It bombed in The States because people didn’t get the story. Europe got it. Like, what the fuck? What movie did you see?
DM: Children, Michael! Mind your language! I stole the gun I was using on set, and the director’s chair with my name on it. My advice is always take something, because you never know if it’s going to be big.
CVD: Blink 182 sent me a piece of a spaceship from a music video.
The roaming mic goes out into the audience.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: When Dizzy and Xander land in the bug nest, why did you have 2 guns and only one knife?
CVD: The Fleet didn’t need a knife. They’re fleet. They’re in space.
MI: You’re asking questions to a guy with a massive bug on his shoulder.
(None of the cast have actual bugs on their shoulders, so I’m not sure what he meant.)
AQ: In the punishment scene, were you actually whipped?
CVD: Some people would like to! It was the longest whip they had. The guy was freaking out. He was, ‘I’m so sorry!’ It didn’t hit me, but I felt the wind on my back. That marine married the girl (in real life) who had shot him in the head (in the film). She really blew his mind!
Another question relates to how the cast gelled together on set.
DM: It was my 3rd film. Everyone except Michael (Ironside) was new to movies. It was awesome.
CVD: Michael was like a mentor to me. I still hear his voice. Even now!
MI: A good director knows exactly what he wants all the time.
I ducked out here to get to my last photo op of the day: Richard Chaves, Poncho from Predator. He liked my t-shirt from Last Exit to Nowhere!
On the day, I was weighing up spending even more than I already had by shelling out for some phone pictures with a few celebs. Paul Reiser, Burke in Aliens and Jim the dad from Whiplash, he was £60. Denise Richards, £50. Casper Van Dien, £40. There was also Daniel Kash, Spunkmeyer from Aliens, although I didn’t even get a photo *of* him.
Bryce Dallas Howard, director Ron Howard's daughter. Claire Dearing in Jurassic World, Kate in Terminator Salvation, Lacie in Black Mirror Nosedive
Gaming area
Return of the Jedi set
Aliens cosplay
Rainn Wilson, Dwight Schrute in The Office (US), Gallaxhar in Monsters vs Aliens, smaller roles in House of 1000 Corpses, Galaxy Quest, Almost Famous, Juno, CSI, Star Trek.
Denise Richards. Cindy in Loaded Weapon 1, Carmen in Starship Troopers, Kelly in Wild Things, Dr Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough
Fiery salt & pepper chips
Jake Busey, Gary Busey's Son, Ace Levy in Starship Troopers
Jenette Goldstein, Vasquez in Aliens, Janelle in Terminator 2, Irish mum in Titanic
Michael Winslow, voice actor. Larvell Jones in Police Academy, voice of Mogwai and other Gremlins, small roles in Spaceballs, Robot Chicken, Cadbury ads.
Michael Ironside
Cameron Monaghan. Ian Gallagher in Shameless, Jerome and Jeremiah Valeska in Gotham
Dirk Bededict, Face in The A-Team, Lt Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica
