-an OD of Toughts-

Howard Gordon has been churning out TV brilliance for decades—24, Homeland, and now, because apparently he doesn’t believe in sleep, he’s teamed up with Gabe Rotter to drop Netflix’s latest anxiety-inducing masterpiece: The Beast in Me. And let me tell you, this thing doesn’t just grip you; it leaps out of the shrubbery, knocks you over, steals your biscuits, and sprints away laughing. The story follows Aggie Wiggs, played by Claire Danes, who is an author suffering from writer’s block so severe it should qualify as a medical emergency. Her son has died, her creativity has evaporated, and she’s basically one bad day away from shouting at her furniture. Then in moves Nile Jarvis, Matthew Rhys, looking exactly like the kind of neighbour who’d borrow a lawnmower and return it covered in blood. Jarvis, a real estate mogul with a past shadier than the M1 on a foggy morning, becomes Aggie’s new obsession, not because he’s charming, oh no, but because everyone suspects he murdered his wife. A...

There’s a small slice of Lija where civilisation seems to have peaked. It’s called Rani, and it lives inside an old Maltese townhouse that’s been renovated so handsomely you half expect it to demand its own modelling contract. Limestone walls, dashes of colour, and that glorious orange traditional shop façade outside that basically shouts, “OI, YOU! COME EAT.” Inside, it’s sparkly-clean, honestly, operating-theatre clean, and the staff move with the precision of a well-oiled machine. Attentive, polite, and faster than you can say “I’ll just browse the menu,” they set the tone immediately by dropping a couple of mini potato tarts on the table. These little parcels of joy came topped with crispy strips of Bombay mix, and they were so good I briefly wondered if I could get away with ordering 40 of them and calling it a meal.  Starters included vegetable samosas that were perfectly crisp and not filled with the usual “what even IS this?” mystery mush; onion bhajis that tasted like crun...

There I was, minding my own business, browsing Prime Video for something that wouldn’t make me want to commit arson, when I stumbled upon Malice — a series that looks, at first glance, like yet another gloomy thriller designed for people who collect scented candles and call everything “trauma.” But no. This thing hits different. “Malice” isn’t just a show. It’s a psychological kick in the throat wearing a designer trench coat . It begins innocently enough: a family, some secrets, some mild emotional damage, and the usual suspicious glances people give each other when someone rewinds the dishwasher the wrong way. But five minutes in, you realise something very important: Everyone in this show is absolutely insane. And I mean,  Prime Video is insane . Not BBC “slightly stressed about taxes” insane. No — full throttle, tyres-screeching, V12-engine-meltdown insane. The Plot: A Slow Burn… Until It Isn’t “Malice” takes its sweet time warming up, like a V8 on a winter morning....

Why the quietest stand at EICMA just stole the entire show. If you wandered through EICMA expecting fireworks, half-naked influencers, and electric scooters pretending to be interesting, you might’ve walked straight past the ASTEMO stand without even noticing. And that would’ve been a tragic mistake, because tucked away in that quiet corner was something far more powerful than all the noise around it: The return of old-school Japanese engineering. The kind that doesn’t shout, doesn’t boast, and doesn’t rush — it simply perfects. ASTEMO, for the uninitiated, is the mega-beast made from Showa, Keihin, Nissin, and Mitsubishi’s automotive component arm. Basically, if motorcycles were religions, these folks would be the monks doing 12-hour meditation sessions surrounded by suspension diagrams. And at EICMA this year, Japan remembered how to be Japan again. The Japanese Philosophy: Why Rush When You Can Take 10 Years? Take their ARAS system—rider assistance based not on radar like everyone ...

There is a new show on Netflix called The Amsterdam Empire , and it is so brilliantly Dutch that halfway through the first episode you start checking your passport to make sure you have not accidentally joined it. When I first saw the title, I expected something involving clogs, cheese, and a few people on bicycles politely arguing about tulips. But no. This is not a quaint travel documentary. It is a razor-sharp, slow-burn drama about power, money, and the sort of people who could buy your entire town while pretending they are just there for the coffee. The series opens with that familiar Amsterdam calm, canals glistening, trams humming, and a city that looks like it has been painted by someone with an unhealthy obsession with symmetry. But under that polite surface something darker stirs. There is a family empire, old money and older secrets, that has been quietly pulling the strings of global trade for decades. It is Succession with bicycles, Peaky Blinders with better lighting,...

I started Down Cemetery Road on a quiet evening, thinking it’d be one of those plodding, rain-soaked mysteries you half-watch while doom-scrolling through your phone. You know the type; the streets are gloomy, everyone’s face looks like they’ve been surviving on instant noodles and regret, and at some point, someone whispers, “There’s been a murder,” as if that’s meant to surprise anyone. But within one episode, I realised this wasn’t that sort of show. It had bite. It had wit. It was as if someone had sprinkled sarcasm all over Oxfordshire and then filmed the results. The writing was sharp enough to draw blood, and the characters weren’t cardboard stereotypes dragged out of the BBC’s prop cupboard. They were gloriously flawed humans, messy, snarky, and trying to stay upright in a world that keeps kicking their shins. It had that rare, intoxicating mix of dark humour and proper storytelling, the sort that makes you mutter, “Oh, go on then, just one more episode.” And just when I was ...

You know those overly sweet Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer , Frosty the Snowman , or anything that smells like cinnamon and regret? The ones where everyone sings about joy while looking like they’ve been mainlining sugar since November? Right. Now imagine tossing one of those into a blender with a haunted house, a corpse bride, and Tim Burton’s teenage sketchbook. Outcomes:  The Nightmare Before Christmas , a film where Christmas gets drunk, falls into a coffin, and decides to stay because the décor is nicer. It’s stop-motion animation, which means an army of lunatics spent two years moving puppets one blink at a time. You’d have to be either an artist or completely deranged to do that, and thankfully, they were both. Tim Burton dreamt it all up, slapped his name on it in giant gothic letters, and wandered off to film Batman Returns . The poor bloke who actually made it work was Henry Selick, the genius who turned Burton’s doodles into moving nightmares. It’...

Every now and then, a television show comes along that grabs you by the eyeballs and refuses to let go. Down Cemetery Road is that show. It’s smart, it’s moody, and it’s got enough twists to make a corkscrew dizzy. Based on Mick Herron’s novel, yes, the bloke behind Slow Horses, the show about alcoholic spies and terrible life choices, Down Cemetery Road swaps espionage for suburban secrets. There’s a house explosion, a missing girl, and more lies per minute than a politician in election season. Ruth Wilson plays Sarah Tucker, a woman whose curiosity is roughly the size of Jupiter. Emma Thompson, meanwhile, plays Zoë Boehm, a private investigator with the kind of haunted stare that suggests she’s seen things no one should ever Google. Together, they wander around Oxford digging up enough dirt to fill a quarry. And it’s brilliant. The writing is sharp, the acting flawless, and the whole thing hums with that slow, creeping dread the British do so well, the sort that makes you feel sli...

There are moments in life when you discover what you’re really made of. Some people lift cars off trapped children. Some stay calm in the face of danger. And others, like the dad in Force Majeure,  leg it faster than Lewis Hamilton when an avalanche heads for the lunch terrace. This Swedish film, directed by Ruben Östlund, begins like one of those glossy ski resort adverts, perfect family, perfect snow, perfect jawlines. You half expect a Volvo to glide past in slow motion. But then, boom, a wall of snow tumbles down the mountain, and in that split second, our hero Tomas reveals his true colours: he grabs his phone and sprints off, leaving his wife and kids behind. Not since the invention of the electric scooter has manhood looked so pathetic. Of course, the avalanche stops short. Nobody dies. The only thing buried is Tomas’s dignity. But that’s when the real disaster begins. His wife, Ebba, doesn’t let it go, oh no. She picks at the wound like a terrier with a sock, reminding him ...

If you’ve ever sat in traffic, fantasising about escaping modern life — the noise, the bills, the idiots on scooters — Eden is here to remind you exactly why that’s a stupid idea. Ron Howard’s latest film, Eden , drops us on a sun-bleached island in the Galápagos, where a collection of 1920s Europeans decide civilisation is overrated. Their grand plan? Build a paradise free of rules, taxes, and presumably deodorant. What they actually build is a human zoo — complete with hunger, jealousy, and a slow descent into madness. It’s Love Island , but with more sweat, fewer bikinis, and a shocking amount of teeth problems. A CAST STRANDED IN STYLE To be fair, the cast is exceptional. Jude Law scowls his way through the jungle like a man who’s just discovered his espresso machine doesn’t work on solar power. Ana de Armas, playing a seductive and unhinged baroness, slinks through the chaos with the confidence of someone who knows she’s the only one wearing silk. Sydney Sweeney, meanwhile, g...

In 2016, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize for uncovering what really happens when you fast — a natural process called autophagy, meaning “self-eating.” When you stop eating for a while, your body doesn’t shut down. It switches on. Your cells begin to clean house — breaking down damaged parts, recycling them into energy, and repairing themselves from the inside out. It’s your body’s built-in self-repair system, activated not by medicine, but by the simple act of fasting. Ohsumi’s discovery revealed that fasting does far more than burn fat. It boosts cellular renewal, slows ageing, supports brain health, and helps protect against diseases such as Parkinson’s, diabetes, and even cancer. What ancient cultures practised for centuries now has scientific proof. Fasting isn’t deprivation — it’s regeneration. It’s your body’s way of saying, “I’ve got this. Let me fix what’s broken.” So the next time you fast, remember — you’re not punishing your body. You’re giving it tim...

   There I was, scrolling through Prime Video, expecting something light and easy for the evening. Maybe a cheerful rom-com, a bit of nonsense, something with a talking dog. Instead, I ended up watching The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, which is basically ten hours of small-town America losing its collective mind in glorious high definition. It begins innocently enough. A quiet town by the sea. Birds chirping. Everyone pretending to be normal. Then, within minutes, someone digs up the body of a teenage girl in the garden of a famous writer, and suddenly the whole place makes Broadchurch look like The Teletubbies. Patrick Dempsey, who we last saw charming nurses and melting hearts in Grey’s Anatomy, now plays Harry Quebert, a tortured author who wrote one great novel and has spent the rest of his life staring moodily at the ocean, probably waiting for inspiration or a decent sandwich. He’s accused of murdering a fifteen-year-old girl who was his so-called muse, which is...

Right. So, Good Omens . The show where an angel and a demon join forces to stop the end of the world. Which, frankly, sounds exactly like the kind of plan the United Nations would come up with after three bottles of claret and a PowerPoint presentation titled “We’re All Doomed Anyway.” On paper, it shouldn’t work. You’ve got an angel who dresses like a walking tea cosy (Aziraphale) and a demon who looks like he just walked off the set of a Rolling Stones tour (Crowley). They’re supposed to hate each other, of course. But like all proper British partnerships — from Morecambe and Wise to Ant and Dec — they can’t seem to function without one another. It’s basically The Odd Couple , if one of them owned a rare bookshop and the other one could make plants tremble in fear. Crowley, played by David Tennant, oozes enough cool to make James Bond look like a geography teacher on casual Friday. He drives an old black Bentley that somehow never breaks down, even though it’s seen more fire and br...

Opening the glovebox, something which is a rarity, I found the CD Luck and Strange by David Gilmour. And it was a bloody godsend to revisit this album. Right. Strap in, because we’re talking about David Gilmour — the man who can make a single note sound more emotional than your entire love life, your car payments, and that time your dog looked at you funny — all at once. Let’s be honest. Most rock legends of his generation have either retired gracefully into boring lives, gone completely mad, or started collaborating with people who make reality TV look like Shakespeare. But Gilmour? No. He’s done what only he can do. Sat quietly for nine years, said absolutely nothing, and then sauntered back with an album so effortlessly brilliant it makes every modern pop star look like they’re smashing toy instruments together in a sandbox. From the very first track, you know it’s him. That honey-dripped guitar tone slides in like a warm knife through nostalgia. It’s not a guitar. It’s a living,...

Right. So Amazon Prime has gone and made another one of those animated anthology things. Except this time they’ve raided the video game cupboard like a teenager at 3am looking for leftover pizza and regret. It’s called Secret Level . And before you ask, no, it’s not about finding hidden bits in Super Mario . Although frankly, that would have been less mental than what they’ve actually done. Because what we’ve got here is Tim Miller, the madman behind Love, Death & Robots , deciding that what the world really needs is Pac-Man . But serious. And dark. And possibly eating people’s souls instead of dots. Each episode is like opening a loot box of gaming nostalgia that’s been left in Chernobyl. One minute you’re watching Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines shouting about heresy and firing guns the size of Volvos, and the next you’re watching Mega Man having a midlife crisis. It’s like scrolling through the fever dreams of a GameStop employee who’s had too much Red Bull. Now, the anima...