-an OD of Toughts-

We Might Regret This is the sort of series the BBC normally commissions only after a three-year workshop on feelings, four diversity taskforces and a stern email from HR. Instead, someone clearly slipped through a script that’s filthy, sharp and actually funny – and then had the nerve to put a tetraplegic woman front and centre without turning her into a walking, talking charity appeal.   Freya, a thirty‑something Canadian artist who can’t move her arms or legs, moves to London for love and ends up in a flat that feels like a cross between a romcom and a care rota spreadsheet. She shacks up with Abe, a straight‑laced bankruptcy lawyer in midlife crisis mode, whose idea of danger is buying non‑refundable train tickets and dating someone half his age who uses a wheelchair.   Because life is cruel and social care budgets are apparently written on the back of a napkin, Freya needs a full‑time personal assistant and can’t find one who isn’t useless, deranged or both. So s...

This isn’t just a tiff between a judge and a Prime Minister. It’s the moment you lift the bonnet on Malta’s justice system and realise half the engine is held together with cable ties and hope. The way we pick a Chief Justice isn’t just flawed. It’s a joke. We pretend that the two-thirds rule in Parliament protects the courts from politics. Lovely. In theory, it forces agreement. In reality, it’s two tribes in suits haggling over which candidate will upset them slightly less. Not a wise choice. A least‑worst option. The noble language of “constitutional independence” quietly mutates into “Who can we live with without choking?” But a Chief Justice is not a flatmate. They’re not someone the parties merely tolerate. They should be someone the Republic actually trusts. When people start hearing that candidates are weighed by party reaction, TV optics, and internal loyalty charts, the problem isn’t the gossip. The problem is the wiring. The system is built so politics gets first dibs and ...

Watching Extras today is like walking into a pub that hasn’t changed the carpet since 1978 — it smells faintly of regret and cigarettes, and you know something gloriously offensive probably happened there once.   Ricky Gervais, in all his smug brilliance, created a show that poked every inflated ego in television’s fragile ecosystem. Celebrities didn’t cameo to look good — they came to be dismantled. Kate Winslet, Patrick Stewart, Les Dennis — all handing in performances so self‑deprecating you wonder if they needed therapy afterward.   The plot? Gervais plays Andy Millman, a man whose acting career makes Malta Public Transport look efficient. He spends each episode being metaphorically kicked in the shins by life, showbiz, and his own crippling sense of pride. He’s like the human version of a beige Chinese SUV — desperate to be interesting but doomed to embarrassment at every junction.   And yet, amid all the social car crashes, Extras had a kind of savage...

Right, they've unleashed this Netflix nonsense called How to Get to Heaven from Belfast and it's like someone took Derry Girls, shoved a dead body in the boot, and drove it off a cliff into the Irish Sea. Three mates—Saoirse, Dara, and Robyn—stumble into their idiot pal Greta's fake funeral in some bog called Knockdara, only to realise she's scarpered like a fox from a henhouse. Cue bumbling detective work across Ireland's drizzle, with gun-toting nutters, exploding cabins, and enough pink handbags to stock a drag queen's convention. Filmed partly in Malta, mind you, my backyard of sunburn and roundabouts. Spot the Westin Dragonara and Salini Resort pretending to be Portugal's Algarve, where these eejits splash about pools like drowning kittens while dodging assassins. It's recognisable if you've ever choked on a pastizz by the beachfront: sunny bollocks clashing with Belfast gloom, turning paradise into a farce of chases and chinwags. The Derry Girl...

 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...