-an OD of Toughts-

 Every so often a television series arrives that doesn’t so much step onto the screen as stomp into your living room, kick over the coffee table and demand you pay attention. “Unfamiliar” is one of those shows, a strange, swaggering beast that looks like prestige drama but behaves more like a pub argument after closing time. On the surface, it’s simple enough: ordinary people suddenly confronted with events that make no sense at all – places that shift, memories that don’t line up, rules of reality that seem to have been written by a bored teenager with a malfunctioning laptop. Instead of brave heroes calmly “processing their trauma”, we get people reacting the way real humans do: badly. They swear, they panic, they make idiotic decisions, then double down on them with the grim determination of someone insisting their sat‑nav “must be right” while driving into a lake. Visually, the series is gorgeous in that slightly smug modern way: every frame looks like it’s been filtered throug...

 Right, let's talk about this absolute circus show from Robert Abela and his so-called "Board of Peace" nonsense. Trump's cooked up this megalomania-fueled fantasy club—pay your dues, kiss the ring, and pretend you're brokering world peace while ignoring the Palestinians getting steamrollered. It's like if I launched the " Board of Perfectly Tuned Aston Martins," but only for sycophants who chip in a million quid and ignore the clapped-out Fords rusting in the corner. Utterly disgusting, venal, and evil. What's new? Nothing. But Malta's nitwit Prime Minister just had to wade in with his size 12 ego boots. Abela starts yapping about an "informal" invite for Malta—like he's been personally WhatsApped by the Orange Emperor himself. Then he backpedals, says the format's "not ideal" (no kidding, you pillock), and now it's all vanished into the ether, like one of his government's scandals.  Was there ever a real ...

Right, buckle up your seatbelts, because Netflix, early January, lobbed this "His & Hers" bomb into our laps like a dodgy hand grenade with the pin half-pulled, and it's got more corpses per minute than a butcher's Christmas rush. Tessa Thompson's Anna is your classic ex-TV anchor turned suburban zombie, festering in Atlanta's armpit humidity with the ghost of her dead kid tap-dancing on her conscience – probably blaming her for that time she left the fridge door open. Then Jon Bernthal's Detective Jack, her ex-old man and walking midlife crisis, stumbles into their sleepy hometown of Dahlonega, where some poor cow had her head turned into pate with what looks like a lump hammer. Six episodes were binge-dumped because life's too short for weekly teases when you could be mainlining the misery instead. Plot: A Black Hole of Hilarious Horror Anna hightails it back home like a moth to a flame-grilled barbecue, poking her nose into the bash where her o...

There was a time when the BBC made programmes about lions, Spitfires, or men called Nigel quietly repairing dry stone walls. Now we have Small Prophets . Which, judging by the title alone, sounds less like a television series and more like something you’d buy from a crystal shop in Totnes for £14.99. “Handcrafted ethically sourced prophets, now in travel size.” But no. It’s a drama. And like many modern BBC dramas, it begins not with anything exciting — not a car chase, not an explosion, not even a decent punch-up — but with a lot of meaningful staring out of windows while it rains. Always rain. Apparently, Britain is now a permanent car wash. What is it about? The premise, roughly, is this: A group of ordinary people start experiencing “visions” — flashes of the future, tiny prophecies, whispers of what’s about to happen — and must navigate the moral, emotional and existential consequences of knowing things they really shouldn’t. Which sounds thrilling. Except it isn’t. Be...

There are two types of crime dramas. The first type involves handsome detectives, tasteful jazz music, and crimes so gentle they might as well be parking violations. The second type involves shouting, broken noses, and men named Gaz doing something extremely illegal with a van. Steal proudly belongs to the second category. And thank God for that. From the opening scene, it doesn’t ease you in. There’s no soft introduction. No “previously on” nonsense. It simply grabs you by the throat and hurls you into a world where everyone is tired, slightly sweaty, morally questionable, and permanently five minutes away from catastrophe. It’s less Ocean’s Eleven and more Ocean’s Eleven if everyone owed money to a bloke called Big Tony who keeps ferrets. The crew at the centre of it all aren’t masterminds. They’re not suave. They don’t own turtlenecks. These are the sort of people who plan a heist using a half-charged phone and a kebab receipt. And that’s precisely why it works. Beca...

Modern cinema has become a bit like a modern electric hatchback: clinically efficient, eerily quiet, and possessing all the soul of a microwave oven. You sit in the dark for two hours, watch a man in spandex punch a CGI cloud, and leave feeling like you’ve just spent the afternoon at a health and safety seminar. But then, along comes Sinners. And suddenly, it’s like someone has lobbed a live grenade into a library. Ryan Coogler hasn’t just made a movie; he’s bottled the humid, bone-chilling dread of the 1930s American South and spiked it with something supernatural and deeply, deeply angry. It’s dark, it’s visceral, and it has the kind of tension that makes you feel like you’re trapped in a lift with a Doberman that hasn’t been fed since Tuesday. However, we need to talk about the real star of the show. It’s not Michael B. Jordan—who, let’s be honest, is excellent, but always looks like he spends far too much time in the gym lifting heavy pieces of iron just for the hell of it. No. The...

I’m going to start with a confession. Usually, when I look back at things from 2008, I laugh. I laugh at the trousers, I laugh at the mobile phones that looked like oversized calculators, and I laugh at the idea that we thought a 1.4-litre hatchback was "sporty." But I’ve just started watching Fringe in the year of our lord 2026, and I’m not laughing. I’m actually looking over my shoulder to make sure a man in a grey suit isn’t about to erase my existence with a look of mild boredom. The 18-Year Head Start Watching this show today is like finding a copy of tomorrow's newspaper in a bin from two decades ago. In 2008, the writers weren't just guessing; they were basically looking through a telescope at our current lives. Take AI. Back then, AI was just a robot that said "Beep" and hit a wall. In Fringe, they were talking about The Observers—beings who had sacrificed their emotions for raw, calculated intelligence. Sound familiar? It’s basically what we’ve done...

​I’ve been reading a few bits on the Abolition of Universal Suffrage, and it’s reminded me of Donald Trump’s recent performance at Davos. Calling it a speech is like calling a pile-up on the M1 a driving maneuver. It was embarrassing, it was pathetic, and it had the intellectual depth of a puddle in a car park. ​72 minutes. That’s how long it took. 72 minutes of pure, unrefined lunacy, beamed live to a planet that I suspect was looking for the off switch. ​72 minutes in which the President of the United States—the man in charge of the world's largest economy—confused Greenland with Iceland. Not once. Repeatedly. While explaining that he wants to buy it. It’s like watching a man walk into a showroom, point at a Volvo, and scream that he wants to buy that Ferrari. And then insisting the Volvo is actually a ham sandwich. ​Then we got the biology lesson. He claimed he has 100% Scottish blood and 100% German blood. Now, even for a man who thinks exercise uses up a finite battery insid...

Why Weight Comes Back Faster After Slimming Jabs And Why Butter, Bacon, and Not Eating for a Bit Might Save You Slimming injections are the latest miracle cure. They’re discussed in hushed, reverent tones normally reserved for Italian supercars or petrol prices that don’t induce weeping. People take them, and suddenly the food stops. Biscuits lose their seductive whisper. Portions shrink. Weight drops off. For the first time in years, the bathroom scales stop behaving like a spiteful ex. Everyone says the same thing: “This is it. I’ve beaten biology.” They haven’t. Because there’s a small, deeply inconvenient question nobody asks while the trousers are getting looser: What happens when the injections stop? What Actually Happens When the Jabs Stop Serious researchers in The BMJ looked at over 30 clinical studies on GLP-1 drugs. These injections were designed for diabetes and are now masquerading as the answer to obesity. The results were stunningly consistent: You lose weight on the ja...

 I sat down to watch Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix expecting another jaunty Knives Out romp. You know the sort of thing: wealthy idiots, extravagant houses, and a murder solved by a man who sounds like a foghorn trapped in a teacup. What I got instead was a church. In winter. Full of guilt. This time Benoit Blanc has wandered into a bleak little parish where everyone looks like they’ve either committed a sin, covered one up, or are thinking about doing both before lunch. The colour palette is fifty shades of grey misery, and for a while, you wonder if Netflix has accidentally auto-played a Scandinavian crime drama. Now, let’s be clear. This is not bad. In fact, it’s very clever. Possibly too clever. Rian Johnson has decided that instead of poking fun at the rich, he’s going to poke faith, morality, hypocrisy, and the human soul. Which is bold. Admirable, even. But it also means that for the first chunk of the film, absolutely nothing explodes, and nobody makes a witty remark while ho...

There are comedies that make you laugh until your ribs creak. There are comedies that make you wish you had stayed at home and watched paint dry. Then there is Code 3. A film that strolls in pretending to be a harmless bit of fun and then quietly reaches into your chest to rearrange your emotions like a drunk electrician rewiring a house. You begin watching with the usual expectations. Flashing lights. Paramedics shouting at traffic. A rookie who looks too fresh to have ever dealt with anything more stressful than a late Amazon delivery. Rainn Wilson appears as Randy. Cynical. Tired. Running purely on caffeine and spite. You relax, thinking you know exactly what is coming. You do not. The humour starts off dry and sharp. The kind of humour you find only in people who have seen too much nonsense to be bothered with politeness. You laugh because it is funny. Then you laugh because it is uncomfortably true. Then, just when you are settling into the rhythm, the story shifts. Suddenly the f...

Some films are brilliant. Some films are popular, and you watch them so you don’t feel like the only person on Earth who missed the memo. And then there’s Rental Family, a film so wonderfully insane it makes you question not just cinema, but humanity itself. The premise is simple. You can rent a family. That’s it. Pay strangers to pretend they are your parents, siblings, maybe even your spouse. At first you think, fine, quirky comedy, harmless fun. Then you realise the horror: this is a world where people are so desperate for connection that they will literally pay actors to fake affection—and these actors are professionals. They are better at being human than almost anyone you know. Watching them smile and nod and pretend to care, you start to wonder whether actual families are a cruel joke played by evolution. Brendan Fraser stars as Phillip, a lonely American actor in Tokyo who drifts into this service like someone wandering into a forest at midnight. His life is empty, his meals ar...

 If you have ever wondered what it feels like to have your soul wrung out like an old chamois cloth that has been forgotten in the sun then Nuremberg is the film for you. It does not so much begin as it leaps straight at you like a German Shepherd that has been told you are hiding sausages in your pockets. The whole thing is a towering slab of history drama and humanity delivered with all the subtlety of an air raid siren. You settle in thinking you are about to enjoy a calm evening perhaps nibbling on something civilised and suddenly the film drags you right into one of the most important courtrooms in human history. And it is not gentle. Absolutely not. It grabs you by the lapels and practically shouts LOOK AT THIS THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED. And you do because you cannot look away. The performances are the kind that make you think this is why some actors earn more than the GDP of small nations. The moral weight of the whole thing could flatten an elephant and yet you sit there com...

  The Matcha Rival Has Arrived, And It Smells Like Someone Toasted Kyoto Straight from Japan comes a drink that smells like hazelnuts and freshly baked bread, and it wasn’t invented by a wellness influencer wearing beige linen. This thing called hojicha started life as an everyday brew for normal people. And now, somehow, it has become the latest global obsession. You can’t escape it. It’s everywhere, in pretentious cafés that insist on calling themselves laboratories, in pastries, in those frothy milk drinks people queue forty minutes for, and even in ice cream mixes. Hojicha is having a moment, and unlike matcha, which has spent the last decade colonising the Western world one green latte at a time, this toasted tea tells a completely different story. Understanding hojicha means stepping away from fashion trends and realising how a humble Japanese daily drink has accidentally become the world’s newest fetish. The Toasted Tea from Kyoto Hojicha literally means toasted tea, whi...

 The new series Can You Keep a Secret? has arrived, and I’ll admit, I approached it with the enthusiasm of a man opening a bill marked “urgent.” Charming comedy, they said. Heart-warming, they said. Which usually translates to 25 minutes of people smiling politely while absolutely nothing happens. But this time, astonishingly, something does happen, and it’s gloriously stupid in the very best way. The entire show is built around secrets. Everyone has one, no one can keep one, and the result is a beautiful parade of human incompetence. You’ve got characters sneaking around, lying through their teeth, panicking at perfectly innocent questions, and collapsing under pressure like a budget garden chair. It’s less a plot and more a controlled demolition of their dignity. And the fun part? You’ve met these people. They live on every street. They work in every office. One of them might even be the person reading this over your shoulder right now. They’re not glamorous, they’re not sleek...

 I re watched  Jaws today. The 50th Anniversary 4K restoration. Which sounds like the sort of thing only men of a certain age do, usually while muttering “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” and poking the television settings like it’s a wounded animal. And here’s the thing. They really don’t. Because Jaws , even half a century on, is still utterly terrifying. Not in a modern, CGI, “look at the pixels” sort of way. But in the much worse way. The imagination way. The shark, now rendered in pin-sharp 4K, still barely bloody works. You can practically hear it creaking. And yet it remains the most frightening monster in cinema history. Why? Because Steven Spielberg had the good sense to keep the thing off screen, let John Williams’ music do the heavy lifting, and trust the audience not to be idiots. Modern films would’ve had the shark doing backflips in the first five minutes. What really hits you on this rewatch, though, is not the shark. It’s the men. Roy Scheider’s ...