Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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HBO Max and Paramount+: What It Might Mean For Sports
Today the deal was done, and Paramount took over Warner Bros. Discovery in a massive deal that has much of Hollywood quaking. There were some last minute wrinkles with a deal being struck a couple of weeks ago with a group of US Attorneys General, with the general view being that they folded and didn’t…
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The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
This book lays out the horrifying facts about climate change in a compelling and urgent way. In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells takes a comprehensive stroll through the very real perils that the world is facing from climate change. He opens with a devastating picture of just how quickly we’re going to see real suffering and destruction,…
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Berberian Sound Studio
Berberian Sound Studio was a very fine 2012 horror film made by Peter Strickland. Set in the seventies, Toby Jones starred as Gilderoy, a sound mixer who has been employed to work on an Italian film called The Equestrian Vortex. He believes that he was employed because of his sound recording and mixing on a documentary about…
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Undercover Advertising
In the UK, we have some really tight restriction on what and how we are able to advertise. Ofcom has a Broadcasting Code. The Advertising Standards Authority has both Broadcast and Non-Broadcast Codes. Beyond these, there are EU wide codes, and industry codes. But frankly, the internet still appears to be the wild west. Panorama…
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Das Boot
I first saw the original 1981 Wolfgang Petersen version of Das Boot on TV sometime in the late 80s. But it wasn’t until a 1998 re-release of the extended director’s cut of the film, that I saw in a cinema on Lower Regent Street, that I can honestly say that I saw it properly. That version…
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My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing
A twisted thriller about a couple who are not all they seem. The set-up for My Lovely Wife is intriguing and it’s hard to avoid giving away too much in the way of spoilers. ‘Tobias’ narrates this story. He’s married to Millicent and they live together in an idyllic gated community in Florida with their two kids…
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Tangerine by Christine Langan
The cover of the paperback edition of Tangerine has a quote from The Times claiming that the book is like a cross between Girl on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. This was one of those books that I absolutely did pick up based on the cover – but that strapline also sold it to me. Tangerine is Waterstones’ fiction book…
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Normal People by Sally Rooney
When a book receives as much hype as Sally Rooney’s Booker longlisted, Costa winning and Waterstones winning novel, it can have a reverse reaction for me. The book sounds like it’s being over-hyped. I begin to think that it can’t possibly live up to expectations. I tend to actively avoid such titles. But then, I…
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Turbulence by David Szalay
This is essentially a book of short stories with a clever over-arching mechanic that links them. Each chapter tells a different story about someone who is somehow travelling between airports. So the first chapter starts with a flight from London to Madrid. The next story will take us from Madrid to Dakar. And so we…
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Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Ghost Wall was a book that seemed to come up in quite a few of Best of 2018 blogs and articles that I read over Christmas, so I was eager to read this. It’s an incredibly slim volume, running to around 150 pages, but in packs an absolute punch. I read it across a single day. Silvie…
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Man at the Helm and Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe
When Love Nina came out a few years ago, I thought it was one of the funniest books I’d ever read. Nina Stibbe was a young girl from Leicester who’d come down to London to become a nanny. The book is made up of letters sent home describing the goings on the Gloucester Place household.…
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Books, Books, Books
If you’re a reader of this blog via an RSS reader like Feedly then two things are of note: You are very sensible. RSS readers are still excellent ways to stay on top of numerous websites. You are going to see a deluge of book reviews sometime around about now. Read on to discover why.…
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The Not-Live BAFTA Awards
In 2002, Ant and Dec remade the famous “No Hiding Place” episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. This was a classic episode of the sitcom where the “lads” tried to avoid learning the result of an away England game, before highlights were shown later that evening on TV. Something that made some sense when the original version aired…
Hadrian’s Wall
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