The main thing 2023 taught me was that having a newborn in the house changes your life in ways you can’t comprehend in advance. Similarly, you might think 4 months off work for paternity leave might afford a little extra reading time, perhaps? But that’d be naively ignoring your near-total inability to concentrate due to having screwed up sleep patterns. You engage with quite a lot of TV because you can’t really go out of an evening any more… but you can’t really engage with TV much because of the constant legging it upstairs to try to coax the baby back to sleep again.
June brought on new challenges as I integrated with a new job, including 2 days a week commuting to an office an hour away – so goodbye to the 2am finishes & associated nerdly content.
20 films
30 TV shows
7 books
That’s 7 books, if you don’t include “That’s Not My Puppy”, “That’s Not My Hamster”, “Peck Peck Peck”, “Zoom! To the moon!”, “Woof Woof!”, “Who’s wearing the hat – is it the orange cat?”, or “Hairy McLairy From Donaldson’s Dairy” (et al.), which I seem to be reading at least once, each, every day.
And helpfully this thing’s not letting me go through and add the thumbs up or down like I normally do, so that’s validating. Almost like I didn’t 100% nail the migration of my blog over to a new hosting platform without cocking anything up…. hey ho!
BEHOLD… 2023, in all its glory.
January
A gang of tropes wind up at a rich person's home to be tormented and in the mix (IS he there by mistake, or not?!) is Daniel Craig channelling the chicken lawyer from Futurama to solve it all at the last minute. A useful illustration of how media positioning can give a consumer the impression that everyone else is watching this, and therefore triggering fomo. Can't recall having any conversations about it though.
Ever get it in your head that you just really wanna watch something you've seen many times before? I *think* the line that was swimming around in my head was "Oh we wanted to stand up and hiss - we've seen shit, but NEVER like THIS!". I just don't think you can best Nathan Lane in comedy musical. There was no way I wasn't gonna watch this after seeing the original film recently. 👍
I really, really miss the old days of FOTSN - cramming a bunch of sweaty nerds into a room above a pub and feeding them maths and science nerdery every month. So to stumble on this DVD special was something of a welcome nostalgia blast. Plenty of lo-fi charm, and PLENTY of nerdery. WOOT!
This was an exercise in completism - I recall starting this a few times in the last 10 years, and never quite getting through it. In hindsight it probably wasn't worth bothering, although some of the performances made it worth the stupid plot twist. I feel like Tarantino's ego maybe got a bit too big. 👎
February
Refreshing to find one of those films that leaves you thinking WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST WATCH?! I don't understand how this could be so memorable, and yet so irritating. And yet I keep finding myself talking about it. Tangibly I can say that the apex of the boat sequence features probably THE worst scenario I can imagine ever finding myself in: a pitching, yawing boat on rough seas with people being thrown about like ragdolls, amid waves of vomit and excrement, while a boorish drunken oligarch bombastically addresses the occupants of the boat over the tannoy and lectures them incoherently about capitalism.
I’m a huge fan of Shaun Micallef, although I believe in Australia the reason he hasn’t been more commercially successful is that a lot of people don’t “get” him. This book is a collection of scripts from various shows he’s worked on, interspersed with opinion/analysis/storytelling & footnotes by Micallef (and, allegedly, his long-time collaborator Gary McCaffrie) which leaves me wondering, “What’s to get?”. The man’s genius is plain as day! A marvellous exponent of silliness and surrealism with many strings to his bow… this book was a great read. I got a bit lost on some of the more nuanced politics stuff (being out of Australia for 19 years now), but every few pages would be something that made me almost weep with delight. Like the inside back cover blurb – “We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire, where Mrs Buckley lives. Every July, peas gather there in great shoals”. When you know, you know.
I'll be brutally honest and say I don't remember specifics on this one - it's the ongoing story of a couple of women thrust into friendship through some death & treachery, with layers of secrets at work and some ludicrous scenarios. I do enjoy watching it though, even though the plot finds itself reaching a bit (yes, there's twins in it).
March
Robin Ince is a singular treasure, and I think only he could put together a story like this in a way I’d thoroughly enjoy reading so much. On face value a narrative of his tour around Britain promoting his previous book, but so much more… a glimpse into the brain of an undiagnosed ADHD comic. A love-letter to independent bookshops. An exponential library-based incarnation of the 12 tasks of Hercules. Achingly human, but also well-clipped enough never to descend into mawkishness. And, a reading list that would last some people a lifetime. Loved it from start to finish.
A much more engaging read that David’s last book… Broadly hanging off the idea of presenting a history of independent whisky bottling, this entertaining tome serves mainly for the author to spool out some anecdotes and make 2 points. But it’s done in a way I find so engaging that I’m happy to say that while I have no idea whether I got what I wanted out of it (whatever that was), I’d recommend it as a fun read. I THINK it highlights what a strange business the whisky industry is, and that to be around it in the late 90’s/early noughties was a singular time of opportunity to taste great whiskies as/after the great whisky loch. And that, as Dave Broom succinctly puts it, People Make Whisky.
April
May
File this as one not to attempt on a long-haul flight when the sleep deprivation's kicking in. Starts pretty off-kilter. Progresses along familiar yet unpredictable lines, and then - as far as I'm concerned - takes a huge leap into WTF territory. If nothing else, this is worth a watch to see something outside of any formulaic tropes. And probably a lot more exciting if you're not passing out with exhaustion and having to rewind every 10 minutes. 👍
More Star Wars universe IP-mining. I don't see why everyone's so into this. I mean, he looks cool - but probably the most interesting thing about the show is the amount of analysis and speculation it's generated about whether Mandalorians == Space Jews. I don't understand the issues enough to comment, and don't have a dog in that fight anyway: but to me it's a lot more interesting a discussion than more Lucas-adjacent fanboi-ing. 👎
Decent drama about 2 best friends, and by the end of it you can understand how everything's gotten to the way it has. Pretty emotional stuff, and decent TV.
Cinematic presentation of the 1970's seminal Judy Blume book about coming of age, religious freedom and bodily autonomy: and I only agreed to go to this because I was thinking of a totally different story when asked. In hindsight, nobody's going to remake 1977's "Oh, God!" - who the hell would you cast in the George Burns role?!
June
Sure, it's never gonna be "original Henson", but this Muppet spinoff was the first post-buyout iteration I actively *liked* - a real return to the Muppets just "being fun" rather than being funny. The celeb cameos all felt a lot more "knowing" than in the old days, and some of those references were a little arduous, but overall - really watchable & enjoyed this immensely! 👍
Genuinely interesting bit of sci-fi/drama of the sort where the episode starts a long way from where it finishes, and just when you think you know what it's about another plot element is revealed. Coupled with being a properly decent bit of William Gibson-esque cyberspace/virtual reality type content actualised by the tech of today, and you've got a gripping and well-constructed world. 👍
July
Well, this was unusual - initially a very oddly positioned seemingly-sitcom about an ex-veteran now turned hitman, who gets engaged by some comically bad criminals to perform an assassination only to get himself accidentally enrolled in an acting class and want to give up the hitman life. I mean, as premises go this is not a heavily-mined seam. Great performances and a grippingly demented storyline take you places you never expected to be, and the whole thing gets tied up neatly in fairly short order. Great! 👍
God, they're all awful, aren't they? We weren't doing the weekly-watch and so missed out on the week-by-week popular intrigue (remember back in the past when we used to work in offices and this sort of thing was called "watercooler chat"?). It worries me a bit how this show was wildly popular in the UK and featured as a normal practice the barefaced lying to one's inner circle whilst also lying to the outsiders with whom the characters were keeping their options open. The whole thing was a bullshit-based game of chicken to see which person was going to actually go through with a doublecross and allow all the in-reserve plans to swing into action. Gripping, and awful, but wonderful. 👍
A history of the Working Mens’ Club movement, told through the eyes, experience and research of master beer writer Pete Brown: never delivering anything as dry as a pure history, but sure learns you up on a lot along the way. Particularly fascinating was the recounting of how Gentlemens’ Clubs were set up and had their own rules in ways that commoners couldn’t get access – so a few canny operators learned that they could form their own clubs, meet all the criteria, and play by the same rules. That aside there’s the usual measure of riveting social history, and as with Brown’s other books this would be a highly advisable read for anyone who’s made the UK their home and wants to understand yet another facet of these fascinating people.
I was drawn to this by Armando Ianucci's involvement, and intrigued by Hugh Laurie's presence (plus supporting case - Zach Woods, Rebecca Front, and Josh Gad as a low-rent Jack Black). While the first couple of episodes struggled to figure out what they wanted to be I felt like this was settling into being quite a decent and off-kilter sitcom - set aboard a luxury space cruiser stranded in space after an accident, it managed to explore topics & plots that weren't just the obvious tropes of that genre. Some really great comic constructions (e.g. the brown sewer pipe causing a cloud of excrement to orbit the body of the ship, which was mitigated by projecting a light show on to, culminating in people saying that they could see the face of The Pope in the cloud, and crowds of passengers staring out the window to see if THEY could spot The Shitpope). Once the show hit its rhythm the writers upped their swearing game as well, and the characters really started to evolve and the layers of bizarreness build up. I found myself thinking it a real shame that the show was cancelled after 2 seasons. I can see why, but equally I'd have loved to have seen much more of this. 👍
August
Yes siree, the stories get stupider and the fights get longer - and in this case the film doesn't weigh in much short of 3 hours. It's all the quasi-balletic yet ruthlessly efficient John Wick vs. endless legions of bad guys again, set up in the typical assortment of set pieces. Final battle sequences made me smile though. One sequence was literally presented like a top-down video game. Weirdly had me longing for the much more sensible and linear storylines of the earlier films, though.
This one was a big undertaking: but a 7-season journey allowed for some sweeping plot arcs as well as some good episodic TV. Fabulous cast inhabiting some really strong characters in this: I'd actually watched a lot of the spinoff season, The Good Fight, some time ago and so this was in element some completism to find out how those characters got where they were. I found Diane Lockhart a bit hard to get a bead on, swinging wildly between trusted mentor and adversary to Alicia. Likewise in later seasons the rapidity between splitting law firms/merging law firms/etc. became a bit silly. VERY hard to concentrate on other TV content whilst this was on the go, which in my book makes this show pretty damn compelling. 👍👍
September
Really compelling post-apocalyptic zombie-esque nightmare that had us hooked & on the edge of our seats. I very much enjoyed the vibe of a zombie construct but explained to be caused by a fungal colonisation (leading to different rules), and was a little disappointed to learn that this show was based on a video game - irrespective of how well it's been executed. Definitely hoping for more of this. Very well-executed, indeed. 👍👍
This one was a do-over - we started it back when The Child was born but after about 4 episodes realised that neither of us had the brain power to follow wtf was happening or who all those people were. Well-worth sticking with though as Ryan et al uncover a decades-old plot centering around some incredibly long-game manoeuvres. 👍
Shortened but engaging finale season for this show - thankfully the streamer allowed the conclusion in a short 6-episode season rather than the 3-season cancellation that's become so commonplace in the content wars. Season 4 introduces Tom Clancy's equivalent of Drizzt do'Urden (very nerdy reference there) - Ding Chavez. As far as superweapons go I think they employed him pretty well. 👍
There’s no doubt that Frankie Boyle is one of the sharpest and simultaneously bluntest comic minds of our time – however this book genuinely read like someone had thrown together a list of topics and then collated a bunch of his one liners and mashed them together to form chapters. Perhaps it’s conditioning from the years of watching him spit out two-liners on shows like Mock The Week: but this really read like a MTW anthology. Except for the prose between chapters. That was genuinely disturbing, and possibly brilliant.
October
Just chilling. Expertly and I think sensitively portrayed without shrinking back from the facts but also not holding the story up as rubbernecking trauma driveby. I really, really hope we've learned something from all this.
By this point we're into character-driven drama, but the cast and writers bring their all to the final season and leave it all out there to tie up the story. A couple of self-indulgent conceits follow the retirement and closing the arcs to "present day", and Midge demonstrates yet again that she's a Tour De Force. It seems wrong to say that my favourite characters are Moishe Maisel and Abe Weissman (Kevin Pollak and Tony Shalhoub) in the face of such strong lead women (Rachel Brosnahan and Alex Borstein), but the fathers are just the top dressing and I'm going to miss them all (but especially those two) dearly.
Enjoyable piece centering around the relative shoe minnow Nike's campaign to woo Michael Jordan as their figurehead basketball star. I love watching Affleck/Damon at work, with their easy friendship stretching back decades - and the addition of Jason Bateman was a wonderful extra bit of seasoning. Couldn't help but notice though how for what was essentially a story driven by courting a black family & athlete, most of the screen time was taken up by whitey.
November
The last ride of the gang from Billions. Was this credible? Not really. The motivations of the characters seemed to have come so far from where they started, but the unity against the new common enemy figure of Mike Prince didn't ring true for me. Still, there's a lot to love about watching the machinations of a takedown - complete with jeopardy in great fistfuls and plenty of opportunity for the thing to go wrong. Pantomime Billions. But, not the worst final season of a show.
This was one of those things we had on VHS which as an adolescent I must've seen a good 100 times, and therefore wasn't very surprised to see how much of it I could quote along with, despite not having seen it in over 30 years. WASN'T prepared for how crap the script, dialogue, and acting were going to be but hey ho - in a show as contrived as Dr Who, an excuse to get 5 (well, 4... well, THREE) of the key actors together along with a selection of requisite sidekicks was always going to be 30% more hammy.
Superhero High - a predictable trope. But, from the makers & universe of The Boys? Strap in. More of the unexpectedly creative violence amid a bleak, exploitative storyline and chemical hijinks from Voight Corporation. Great spinoff; makes me even more hungry for the real thing though. 👍👍
I’ve said before, a challenge with reading books by people whose voices you know well (in this case, podcaster Dan Carlin) is that you read their every word in the cadence of their speech. Luckily in this case it didn’t slow things down at all – which is just as well as it covers quite a lot of history: from the Assyrians right through to present day, specifically in the context of some of the main things which keeps humankind poised on the precipice of wiping itself out. Or if not humanity, then certainly civilisations. For example the Assyrian city of Nineveh – biggest city in the world for 50 years, and then following its sacking by an uprising, 200 years later nobody had any memory the place existed. What was quite unsettling though was the number of times Carlin referred to a hypothetical future pandemic, questioning what effect it would have on our modern world. The book was published at the end of October 2019.
Honestly, I don't remember how I came by this. Or, much of what happened in it. But I *do* remember staring at it open-mouthed trying to work out what I'd just seen an earnestly and urgently messaging half my comedy chums to see if they'd seen it too or if I was imagining things. Probably fair to say that not a single scenario in this sketch show finishes the way you would expect. Compelling. Disturbing.
Holy shit. I was well-acquainted with the format of Taskmaster, and my earlier forays into watching it had left me feeling it was amusing enough but really nothing too amazing. But Season 16 changed ALL of that. Maybe it's partly down to my mounting obsession with the good-natured silliness of Alex Horne (the Horne Section Podcast is one of my Happy Places). But the combination of contestants on this season was just pure bottled lightning - fab dresser primary school teacher-esque and barely-mentions-it-RADA-graduate Susan Wokoma plays off arch elder statesman personality and notable homosexual Julian Clary, the twin alien outsiders Aussie space cadet Sam Campbell and northern vacuum Lucy Beaumont, and then to top it all off, National Treasure, massive nerd, and ever-enthusiastic participator Sue Perkins. Just sublime, week after week. Brilliant doesn't even start to touch it. PORTCULLIS! 👍👍
I only finished watching this out of wanting closure - agonising as it was to sit through the performances and scriptwriting of the last half of this. Hard to know whether this became so risible because of the wooden/mechanical scripts, or because the situations depicted were a contrived & unnatural mess. One can only hope that this is in no way based on the way actual governments/PMs work. 👎
December
I wonder if the final season turning into a turd has anything to do with the number of Game of Thrones actors who appeared in this epic? Or, just that it finally got to contemporary time rather than historical time. Either way, the fixating over Diana (in the same way I suppose the country/world did) was utterly nauseating - not even a mention of her famous covert ops with Kenny Everett into gay pub karaoke in Vauxhall! It had us reaching for the remote to put an end to it during the "ghost princess" sequences. And then Liz gave in and went for completeness after Christmas leading to the final insult of the Queens of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Way to butcher a nice thing. 👎👎
Season 1 was so gripping that we were prepared to overlook the fact that Season 2 of this show named after a submarine had nothing whatsoever to do with submarines. Unless it was a metaphor, or something. Drones, a fictional middle-eastern country, corporate intrigue... it's like a British Homeland. And all against the backdrop of wondering if Rose Leslie is going to drop character and say, "You nurr NOOTHIN' Jon Snurr". Which of course she doesn't, because she's a total professional.
I'm all for an apocalyptic nightmare, and this bit featured some particularly strong facets - however what DOES leave my cheese out in the wind is this modern predilection for stories that don't really have a conclusion. Less a story, and more of a series of things happening.
Genuinely ridiculous family Christmas caper with Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito in the leads. The story beats are basically staked into the ground the instant DeVito moves in, but I thought it was executed with good cheer and certainly wasn't any worse than any Christmas movie I've seen in recent years.
I got drawn into this as the show that Antony Starr (of The Boys) headed up previously, and was taken by the premise - a hardened criminal is released from prison, heads to the sleepy Pennsylvania town where his ex-girlfriend now lives, and following a rumble in a bar ends up assuming the identity of the new Sheriff. A background cast includes the town police force, an evil controlling businessman (from an Amish background) and his sexed-up niece, and a succession of antagonists. On the one hand it suffers a bit from the Sons of Anarchy "How much bad shit can go down in a town that small?" incredulousness... but I did enjoy the hyperviolence and some of the moonlighting that the characters got involved in. My favourite moment was in Season 3 where the antagonist was an invincible 6 foot 5 brick shithouse of a Native American, hellbent on taking vengeance on Sheriff Hood for something or other, and from behind closed doors Hood shouts dismissively, "Fuck off, Chayton". I guess you had to be there. 👍
Taking a moment out of trying to get people to justify their opinions on radio, James O’Brien has assembled an excellent if not totally depressing case outlining how a handful of key individuals colluded, conspired, and/or coincided to take Britain from the 2008 Financial Crisis-handling days of Gordon Brown through to where we currently are, the post-Johnsonian mess of a state we’re in now. A frustrating read, because in a sane society this sort of thing ought not to be allowed. But, when the Left tries to appeal to the adjudicator, the Right just enforces their side of the story. In description of most of the figures mentioned by the book, the words “venal”, “self-serving” and “nepotistic” spring forcefully to mind.
