There’s always an odd feeling as you head towards the end of a Welcome to Wrexham series. You know what the result is going to be, and yet somehow, are still drawn along for the ride. The editing is extremely good to ratchet up the tension even when the events have long since taken place and everyone’s moving on to the next objective.

I’ve not been to the Watermill Theatre at Newbury before, tucked away as it is in the depths of the countryside. It’s an incongruous setting for a theatre - beautiful flowing river, overhanging greenery, a sense of countryside history, and then, oh yes, a regional theatre of some renown! My reason for going this time was to see Fanny, the show about the sister of Felix Mendelssohn who, of course, has been overlooked in history despite having plenty of her own successes to write about. I’ve got to be honest that it’s not something I would have ordinarily noticed, except that it was starring the wonderful Charlie Russell from Mischief Theatre.

I was lucky enough to see Tim Rice on stage recently, as the musical legend toured the country to talk about his life, career and achievements. It was worth every penny of the entry price, with the famous lyricist sharing great stories and surprising facts, and a quartet of singers showcasing some of the songs that have littered his illustrious career so far.

I’ve scaled back my Zero Waste efforts recently because real life has gotten in the way, as it always tends to do. But I’m still always interested in people and companies that are thinking outside the box and being innovative in the way they design products. I stumbled on One Good Thing, OGT, who make a variety of protein bars that don’t have a wrapper - or they do but it’s edible so it doesn’t result in any waste at all.

I finished watching the Apple TV show Sugar this week and had intended to tag it on the end of my television roundup post, but the last few episodes made it deserving of a longer review. Firstly, it’s important to say it was a good show and I enjoyed watching it. The first couple of episodes were interesting but potentially not mind-blowing, but some good online reviews convinced me to keep watching and it definitely got better. If you can get past the name Sugar, which is odd when people say it out loud, each episode was more intriguing than the last until episode six when everything was turned on its head.

I’ve watched quite a few TV shows recently that I wanted to give a mention of but couldn’t summon up the thoughts for a full blog post - so it seemed sensible to do a roundup of them all in one go.

Just in the nick of time, I have finished rewatching the third series of Apple TV+ comedy Trying, as the new series starts this week. I do think as the seasons have worn on, the drama and loveliness has increased while the quotability levels have dropped. But I couldn’t love it any more, so here’s the best of the next eight episodes.

Time is running short before the fourth series of Trying begins, but I have finally completed my rewatch of the existing episodes and gathering the wonderful quotes from each episode. I love this show so much, I have to share! This time I’m keeping a full season in one post rather than splitting between episodes, because who doesn’t want a bumper crop of quotes to persue?

I was so excited when I saw that Audible had commissioned and released an audio series of Green Wing, bringing back the original cast in all their glory for more barely medically-related shenanigans at East Hampton hospital. And now, having listened to the six part series many, many times through, I can only say it lived up to all my expectations and I love it!

Today it was announced that women’s tennis is returning to Queen’s club for the first time in more than 50 years, and whilst I can understand that this is an exciting announcement that brings together the two tennis tours at a high profile location, it feels disappointing to me. I’ve previously loved going to Edgbaston Priory Club to watch some tennis and now what was previously a 500 event (middle tier that can garner a few good stars) is now being bumped down to an ITF level event (not main tour).

If you had asked anyone a few years ago who would be shining the best light on what a brutal and thankless job farming is, who would have put their hands up and said Jeremy Clarkson? The guy continues to cause controversy but when it comes to this programme, he’s got it right. Showing the heart and soul of the farming world, the community, the animals, the care and the love that go into making this a vocation. It’s just perfect.

It feels like every year I go into the Eurovision song contest thinking, meh, I’ll watch a bit, see if it grabs me, but I’m really not that bothered this time round. Almost like moving the twenty minute rule from my film watching into the song contest arena as well. I can’t quite believe it’s been two years since Sam Ryder, and I pretty much just want to relive that year over and over instead.

I thought this BBC post about the future of the album was interesting, considering that I spend more time than I’d like trying to decide what counts as an album for my music listening project. The article is pondering the past and future of the album, given how much focus there has been on singles of late, with Taylor Swift leading the charge in a celebration of all things long play.

I’ve forged ahead and watched a lot of Trying episodes in an effort to finish my rewatch before the fourth season begins. I really can’t express how much I love this show, and how much I relate to Nikki. The only way is by continuing to share the best quotes.

I was on something of a leadership course this week and they mentioned the book Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet, which I have previously read. We were played the below video which illustrates a talk from Marquet in relation to this book and I just love it - both the animation as it’s very engaging, and the message at heart as well.

Last year, in preparation for the new series of Trying, I started rewatching the show from the beginning and loved it so much that I had to start pulling out the best quotes from each episode to refer back to. I only got a couple of episodes done last year but I’m picking up the thread again now with some more absolute gems.

I wasn’t expecting it, but the first couple of months of this year have seen a real uptick of movie watching in this household. There’s no rhyme or reason to it but suddenly the bug to watch ALL THE FILMS is back and that means keeping an eye on what’s upcoming actually feels like it has a purpose again, rather than just adding to an overlooked list.

I do find some of the headlines on The B1M videos to be a bit extravagant - it’s the biggest this, the greatest this, the worst of this, etc. etc. But this one about the “world’s most remote infrastructure project” caught my eye because, well, of course it did. The video takes a look at a network of undersea tunnels that is connecting the disparate Faroe Islands and it’s a fascinating watch.

Lydia West seems to have a knack for picking incredible TV shows to appear in - Years and Years was terrifying, brutal and brilliant. It’s a Sin broke me so badly I still struggle to think about it. And now Big Mood, where she stars alongside Nicola Coughlan who is taking the world by storm since first appearing on Netflix’s Bridgerton. With two such strong actors in the lead roles, we’re off to a good start with this Channel 4 show about friends pushed to the breaking point by life, growing up, and mental health.

I really didn’t think The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin was going to be any good. A new comedy series on Apple TV, launched at the start of March, the show features Noel Fielding as the title character and it leans in to his brand of nonsensical, kind of dream-like situations and comedy. You obviously have to like what Fielding does to get on board with this show, but even if you don’t there may be something in there for you because the guest cast is ENORMOUS.

Today the UK shifted forward an hour into British Summer Time and I continue to hate the concept. Every year that passes, the time change seems to rock my foundations more and it takes longer to get back to a sense of normalcy, but never mind, I’m in a privileged enough position to have nothing to do today but get over it.

The first actual item of clothing I knitted was of mixed success so it’s taken me a while to try again. This time I went for a cardigan, as I’m a big cardigan wearer, using this free pattern. There are SO many cardigan patterns out there but I started with this one because it said all the good key words ’easy’, ‘beginner’, ’everyday’.

Really love this post from earlier in the month that celebrates the fifty year anniversary of Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. It’s an incredible song and means different things depending on the version you listen to - Dolly’s soft-spoken heart-felt love song is the original and best, but Whitney’s passionate belting out of the track is absolutely iconic.

Just a thumbs up to Flexi-Hex, a product I pulled out of a recent delivery box and was pleasantly surprised by. Rather than the usual plastic and bubble wrap that you find when opening a box of, let’s be honest about it, gin bottles, Flexi-Hex takes recycled paper and makes a kind of accordian style cardboard thing that does just as good a job of keeping deliverables protected.

I enjoyed the first two seasons of Girls5Eva, a short and sweet comedy series about a girl group who had a brief moment of fame in the past and are now back in the public consciousness (sort of), thanks to a feature in a new song. They regroup, literally, deal with the fact there are only four of them now, and start tentative steps towards a career.

I’ve recently become a little bit obsessed with Geoff Marshall’s YouTube videos, following his stories about railways, stations, the trains that run on them as well as bus routes. It’s very London focussed, naturally, but there are excursions outside the capital too. As his about blurb states: You’ll find me travelling around London and the rest of the country on public transport, creating stories about stations, trains and buses, as well as engineering and design… In 2017, I visited all 2,563 stations in Great Britain, followed in 2019 by going to all 198 stations in Ireland, and I continue to visit new stations as they open. In 2024, I rode a section of all 544 Bus Routes in London.

I was subscribed to Paramount+ through their app and happily watching my way through Yellowstone and Frasier and other such high profile releases, when Apple TV released an update to their platform that integrated usability with certain streamers. From the outset that was already confusing, because you could add a channel, such as Channel 4, Paramount or Disney and it would bring in the traditional gallery of potential watches that would then take you to the programme.

We’re definitely seeing signs of spring everywhere, and if I’m honest some scary signs of summer even during February. The tentative blue skies mean it’s time to start thinking about the garden. I tried to be patient this year, just because there was a nice sunny day in Feb, I didn’t suddenly rush out and plant everything. I waited until March, until a couple more frosts had passed by, and then got things underway.

I recently finished watching the new streaming show The Artful Dodger on Disney+, a show that takes that fabled character from Oliver Twist and shows what he may have gotten up to in later years. We meet Dodger, going by his real name Jack Dawkins, in Australia setting up a new life for himself as a successful surgeon but his rogueish tendancies keep coming back to the fore.

During our second 90s evening (it’s becoming a thing!) I noticed something during the Gladiators episode that was so smoothly done, it hadn’t even registered in my mind. The men’s and women’s events were swapped in order throughout the show and for each episode. For example, who was introduced first, sometimes the men, sometimes the women. Who took to the Eliminator first at the end of the episode? This time it was the men, the other time it was the women.

Just a word of appreciation for the third series of The Morning Show, which I recently finished watching - a little bit later than it’s first release, but better late than never. There’s something about this show that is just endlessly fascinating, even though most of the people in it have a bit of a screw loose and aren’t at all relatable. Sometimes even within an episode, I wonder why I’m watching it, but when the series was over, I missed it. There was a gap in my day that I had previously filled with TV show execs battling it out for supremacy within their own network and with other companies.

I make no secret of my love for the 90s, and often enjoy a bit of culture from that time. However, a certain confluence of events occurred yesterday that meant I somehow went back in time and was living my best 90s life all evening. First, after hearing that Carl Weathers had died, we wanted to pay tribute to him by watching a movie he’d appeared in. Having already completed Predator and the Rocky series, it was left to Happy Gilmore to complete the gap. Happy Gilmore was released in 1996 so kick-started the time travel evening.

I haven’t made a podcast in a good few years now but one part of the process I had a love/hate relationship with has been made so much easier by a new Apple Podcasts feature - auto-generated transcripts. I loved creating the transcripts in collaboration with our incredible community because it was an accessibility feature, it meant we could refer back to the text rather than audio to settle future arguments, and it’s always good to see just how much we prattled on in a physical word count.

A year ago, I reluctantly watched the first series of Traitors in the UK and was instantly hooked, binge-watching the whole thing in a very short space of time. I, like many others, eagerly awaited the second series which came to a dramatic conclusion yesterday, one finalist walking away with just shy of £100,000.

It’s been quite chilly in the UK recently, so it was a good time to finish off my latest scarf. This Kallik pattern was such a good knit, super simple but requiring an element of concentration to make sure the pattern didn’t go awry. It’s just four stitches knit, four stitches purl but shifting each row to make the diagonal pattern. At first, I had to diligently read the pattern and count the rows to make sure I was doing it right, but then discovered I was able to read the knitting as it grew to know what I needed to do next. That was a good feeling.

I’ve had a vague draft for a blog post about the warm hug of familiar media for a while now, but as ever Kottke has written about it better than I ever could. In this post, the question is posed: What’s Your Go-To Comfort Media?

Tennis has rolled into a new year and already we are into the first Grand Slam, with the Australian Open under way and as fascinating as ever. As a UK viewer, the last couple of weeks have been pretty disappointing, as Amazon dropped their coverage of the sport via their Prime streaming service and Sky have picked it up instead.

I don’t have a good track record with Godzilla movies, I always go into them thinking they’re going to be great and then they disappoint. My shortened review of one of them tells you everything you need to know: So I wasn’t that bothered about the new TV series streaming on Apple TV+ that was a kind of sequel-prequel situation between movies, I’d been burned before. The only interesting thing about it was the clever casting of both Wyatt Russell and Kurt Russell as different ages of the same character. How to get a character look the same across the years? Keep it in the family!

A new year and new films. My count of films watched last year was a little low, partly due to less time but also because the time I did have I used to watch so much amazing TV. How can films compete with such great short-form content? Well, we’ll have to see how this year goes and the next batch might help!

This year my list of new year goals was very short and revolved quite a lot around the Playstation, but actually I have been thinking about areas I can reset and get organised, gaining a little bit of control. The first one is subscriptions. I don’t know about you, but I find that subscriptions to various apps, streaming services, and even physical things, can get lost in the wilderness and build up until you’re more out of pocket than you might have thought.

I’ve done it, I’ve decided, phew. It’s taken my a week or two longer than it usually does to decide my top five albums of the year just gone but finally I’m ready to put pen to paper, or pixel to screen, and talk about my finalists. There were only eight albums in the shortlist anyway, which somehow made it harder. I narrowed it down to six but then deciding who to drop and what the order should be… oof! But here goes nothing!

My traditional new year post comes with a wrap up of the year just gone and a look ahead to my aims and goals for the next twelve months. The year just gone can be summed up quite simply as chaos - there was so much going on in both work and life that I was supremely grateful to have time off over Christmas just to rest and recuperate. And mostly play Spider-Man 2.

It’s been another year full of reading and it’s been wonderful, the only downside being I don’t seem to be making as much progress on my bookshelf backlog as I would have liked. But nevertheless, each year I like to pick out ten of my favourite reads from the year. These are the ones I have hand picked, listed in the order that I read them, as I refuse to have to do anymore than narrow it down to ten!

It seems like I’ve been saying this a lot recently - this thing from the past is coming back or being rebooted in some way, and it sounds like a really bad idea. And, just as with most of the other things, it’s actually turned out so much better than I was expecting.

I was not necessarily as geared up for this final as I was hoping - it all just seemed so predictable, and I knew it wasn’t going to be the emotional rollercoaster that other finals have been. However, I kept telling myself that stranger things have happened and Ellie might not just run away with it, right? Great opening dance, by the way, so lovely to include both Amy and Nigel when their dancing was limited by injury.

Hooray, it’s time for another Mastermind specialist topic that I think I could have a good go at if I was sitting in the hot seat. It was a few episodes ago and Amy’s chosen topic was the sitcom MIRANDA. Yay! If I’m being completely honest, I only knew this had occurred because Miranda herself took the quiz on Tiktok. She did pretty well, not 100% though! Amy got ten overall, and I would have got eight, so naturally a rewatch of this show is required now!

The Graham Norton Show is legendary on British TV screens - a chat show that is hilarious but friendly, mixing unexpected celebrities together so that you never know when a fascinating moment is going to happen. I dip in and out, the quality of the show naturally depends on the selection of guests, and your enjoyment varies depending on your knowledge and liking of them. This week’s show featured a great selection: Imelda Staunton (promoting the final series of The Crown), Jamie Dornan (new series of The Tourist starting in Jan), Jack Lowden (third series of Slow Horses is streaming now), Ncuti Gatwa (new Doctor!!) and Gregory Porter as the musical guest (Christmas album).

After a very minor scalding incident with a hot water bottle, I realised that there was a lack of HWB covers in the house and that I could probably whip one up quite quickly with a bit of leftover yarn. I sourced this super easy pattern, and even though I was using slightly different weight yarn, it worked out so well.

After the slightly disappointing quarter final in which an injured Nigel withdrew and no public vote was held, we’re back at the sharp end again. With each couple doing two dances tonight, there will be three scores from the judges added together, although our remaining couples are so close, you have to wonder how much difference that will make. We’re at that point where the start of this competition seems so long ago - remember Nikita and Jody?? But now there are just four couples and eight dances to secure a place in the final. Let’s do this!

I had previously talked about how excited I was for the Doctor Who specials celebrating the 60th anniversary of the show (sort of), and seeing my personal favourites David Tennant and Catherine Tate return. Well, we have three episodes done and dusted and was it worth it? YES! Here are some thoughts from the shows short run, spoilers obviously within: Bifurcating the Doctor! We now have two Doctors running around, what an interesting development! On the one hand, I can imagine DW purists not being particularly happy about this, but on the other hand, I can see the upsides to it. The weight of such momentous recent events for the Doctor must have been weighing them down so to be able to split that off and let it sit off screen for a bit is a bonus. Also, it gives David Tennant the chance to return whenever he wants - hooray! Donna’s family! Loved the introduction/return of Donna’s family, her long-suffering husband, dragon of a mother, and beautiful daughter Rose. We have representation on screen and the brilliant mama bear instincts from both Donna and her own mother Sylvia. Plus wonderful Wilf. There are no words for how lovely it was to see him, if only for one scene. Seeds for the future! I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of the Toymaker and if I’m being honest, don’t think I am much further forward even after a whole episode of his antics. But the fact he’s just in a box tucked away somewhere, and has left a golden nugget containing the Master, means we have potential for future storylines right at our fingertips. Not long to wait for more! I love that we are only moments away from the Christmas special that will see Ncuti Gatwa get his first full outing. From the small glimpse we had, his Doctor seems more warm and energised than our recent traumatised Doctors, so very interested to see what happens on Christmas Day.