When Disney Plus first launched, my only focus was on watching episodes of The Simpsons and devouring The Mandalorian as quickly as possible. Hearing of a TV show based on the High School Musical franchise, though, my interest was piqued. And when I heard that it was a docu-drama style show about teenagers who go to the actual school where the movies were filmed and then decide to put on a production of the musical based off said movies and all of this called High School Musical: The Musical: The Series? Well it would be rude not to see what on earth that was all about, wouldn’t it?

This film gets off to a really bad start. We try not to but find ourselves judging movies by their idents (bit like books and covers) and there were a lot. And then there was about five minutes of documentary footage which made me feel like I’d bought the wrong thing. When the movie part actually gets going, it’s good.

Theatre is one of the biggest things I’m missing in this lockdown, and although the country is (rightly or wrongly) easing out of lockdown status, theatres aren’t looking set to open anytime soon. And if they did, would we be comfortable enough to go to them? In the meantime, and because there is zero support from the government, theatres and artists are having to find their own ways to keep busy and hopefully make a little money to keep going a bit longer. The National Theatre’s weekly streams of their plays have been incredible, although are coming to an end soon.

I really liked this album, it’s probably their best one? I do think it suffers from that problem that some of the greatest albums do - where there are a few amazing tracks together… and then you have the rest of the album. You can’t kick off with Beuatiful Day, Stuck, and Elevation and expect it to go anywhere but down.

I really like Jason Mraz, he has an interesting style, a generally good outlook on life, and I’ve been listening to his music for years. The last album was a bit of a weird one as it was so loved up, it didn’t quite deliver what I’d hoped. I was worried this one might be more of the same, but it wasn’t. Instead, this one was more of hippy, optimistic, we can all do better vibe and, to be honest, it’s probably exactly what we need.

This was a free book given away by Apple, and I read through it pretty quickly. It tells the tale of a young headteacher who battles her own demons to try and stop her school from being closed down, whilst at the same time falling in love with her next door neighbour. Of course that means lots of misunderstandings, twist and turns along the way, romantic dates and blazing rows, and all that good stuff.

Yay for women crushing it in rock and roll. This was a great album right from the start, Suzi giving no inches as she grabs hold of the 70s rock and shakes it for all its worth. It always astounds me that people can multi-task playing bass and singing because I can barely do either of those things let alone both at the same time.

Oh, I loved this. I realised I don’t know a lot about Kodaline but once this started, I didn’t need to. It was the perfect pop album for the moment, upbeat and every song a good one. It reminded me quite a lot of Imagine Dragons.

The gang return for a second adventure, but this time the mystery comes right to their door. With everyone staying at George’s house, and a tutor coming in to give them additional lessons, there’s a plot afoot. I didn’t think this one was quite as good as the first, but mostly because I loved the island in the first one. This time, it’s about secret passageways and scientific espionage!

It is surely not normal for the third (and presumably final?) movie in a series to be the best one? This was a lot of fun right from the start - and any fears I had about these guys coming back older and trying to do the same things they did before were put to rest. Marcus retired, Mike got shot, and both were pretty much outplayed by the new generation.

This one is a prime example. It got off to a really slow start, the dude hanging out with his friends and smoking weed, and if we hadn’t paid slightly more for the rental due to it being an early release, we might have hit the twenty minute rule. But we persevered and I’m so glad we did because it really came into its own. Once he started having to pull his own weight, taking the kids to school, and particularly learning so much about himself and his father at the fire-station, it just got really good.

With the big artists, and those who have evolved over the years, I like to go back to the start and see how it all began. Cher’s first solo album was bang in the middle of the 60s, and it sounds just like its time.

I really didn’t know anything about Tim Burgess before listening to this, but if I’m honest, the choices have been slim pickings so far this year (unsurprisingly). But on the flip side, that introduces me to things that I might not otherwise have listened to, and this is probably one of them. I really liked it!

I loved it, which wasn’t a surprise. The story is your basic thriller - a killer fungus is on the loose and someone needs to stop it. You wouldn’t expect that someone to be two kids with part-time jobs at a self-storage facility, but hey, you never know who’s going to be a hero!

I quite liked the action adventure, young people running around causing havoc aspect of it, but a lot of the story raised more questions than it answered and I’m not sure it really stood up against close scrutiny. And I don’t think the criminal mastermind part of things really came across, not as much as they’re trying to sell it in all the descriptions anyway.

I listened to the audiobook of this, which was, of course, read by Steve Coogan, or by Alan Partridge himself, I suppose we should say. The Partridge humour is some that doesn’t always work for me, but when it does, it makes me laugh a lot. His overblown manner, desperate to be more interesting and important than he is, it grates but it is kinda amusing. His judgement of others is a bit of a let-down, but equally, when he ends up being the butt of the joke, then it’s all worked out in the end.

I don’t know if this was as light as I’d expected, given that it’s based on addiction and a cancer diagnosis, but it was fun anyway. The two have great chemistry and play off each other well, it was funny, and there’s a lot to like about it.

I should have known from the beginning, with the eye-bursting visual, but I spent a good portion of this movie shielding my eyes from the horrors on screen. It’s a good story, the premise is great, and I love that you don’t really know what to believe. Some really solid ideas but the execution was not to my tastes… I couldn’t hack it at all, especially the last ten minutes waiting for the atmosphere to clear.

I was worried going into this one because I remembered liking it but other films that I have fond memories of have not worked out so well on a rewatch. However, this stood up! Thank goodness. It was funny, it was cringey but not in a gross way, and he was actually a better guy than I remembered, because actually a lot of the things that were happening weren’t his fault.

I’ve not been having a very good time with these Star Trek films so far. The first was pretty dire, and I couldn’t get more than half an hour into this one. Part of me feels bad that I didn’t give it a good go, but the other part of me just doesn’t want to even think about worm things crawling into people’s ears.

I read this one through to the end but having come out the other side, I’m not sure I totally enjoyed it. The fundamental concept is an interesting one - compare and contrast the fortunes of someone who had money and lost it all, against someone who didn’t have much to her name and then won a fortune. But the execution didn’t quite work for me, mostly because our two heroines weren’t actually in each other’s stories until the very end.

I needed something warm and comforting this week so dived into the back catalogue of my favourite boy band. This is their second album, and you can tell that they were slightly maturing from their first, but still nowhere near old enough, experienced enough, or in control enough of their albums to let their real sound show.

Lady Gaga tries her hand at so many different genres that you never quite know what you’re going to get, and that often means her music is hit and miss. However, I really enjoyed this album. It’s Lady back to her best as a dance music queen, good solid pop from start to finish.

I hadn’t even heard of this film going into it, but we’re always up for a music movie and this looked like it could be good. I’ve not been a big fan of Dakota Johnson in the past (can’t remember why now…) but she was great in this - torn between her loyalty to Grace and her desire to be something more.

Ah, lovely Kelly Clarkson. You can tell that this, being her first album, isn’t exactly her style - mostly because she’s trying out a few styles along the way. There are elements of Christina, and Alicia, and others, but of course you can’t get away from that great Kelly voice.

On the one hand, I think this is a great effort - at this point in their careers, The 1975 can’t just put out a middle of the road album, they need to be pushing the envelope. I love that it starts with a manifesto from Greta and there are some highlights along the way. On the other hand, I can’t say that this is anything but a sprawling mess.

I’ve seen the film and must have picked up this book at a similar time but it’s taken my a while to get round to reading it. It’s super short, though, so I whipped through it very quickly. Alan Bennett has hand-picked some of the diary entries he wrote about the lady that came to live on his driveway in a van - how that happened, how they managed to co-exist together, and her sad death at the end, plus the subsequent things he learned.

I mean, if you’re going to go Enid Blyton, you’ve got to go all the way back to the start of the five, right? Four kids and a dog go gallivanting around, causing and finding mischief. Some of it is unbelievable in this day and age, I mean for a start that kids would want to spend so much time outdoors but then also that parents/guardians would be happy about their charges heading off to a notoriously rocky island when there’s a storm brewing.

Interesting story this one, in which our protagonist is at rock bottom after moving to Australia and things not working out. A series of coincidences see her end up staying in the spare room of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment, the one he now shares with his fiancée. And that’s the thing, the coincidences here were just a bit much for me. That they found each other to start with. That the ex-boss and potential new boss happened to be sisters. That there was a job at an art gallery going for an artist. That Alice found her on the beach. I don’t know.

This is an odd film. It has that classic older movie problem of being far too slow to get going. Seriously, I don’t mind a bit of build up but it’s 45 minutes before they even decide to do the god-damn heist. And it’s not even that the length of time is a problem in itself, it’s that you don’t learn anything about any of the characters in that time. There’s such a lot of them, that there’s barely time to get to know any, and in the end the only ones you could care about were Big Joe and Oddball.

The ongoing lockdown continues to evolve and I have found it fascinating to see how the creative types have been trying to keep themselves entertained. Plenty are trying to keep doing what they usually do just in a different way. Some are providing distraction for others, and there’s another subset who are using their time to try and impart wisdom to others. I missed this at the time, but Radio 1 have been getting artists to give music lessons, sharing an insight into how to play one of their songs. A few people have participated so far - Niall Horan gives a good go on the guitar, Sigrid gets to grips with Strangers on the piano, but my personal favourite is Danielle Haim showing us a deceptively simple riff for The Steps.

I’ve read this before in a variety of formats but realised I hadn’t reviewed it, so I quickly dug out the audiobook and whipped through it again. I love these Roald Dahl short stories – they’re all so clever, although they don’t all do it for me.

So much better than that Full Throttle sequel! I really loved this. Trust in Elizabeth Banks for a girl power movie that isn’t too in-your-face, it’s just people being awesome. It’s a movie in which Patrick Stewart is the bad guy but was still brilliant!

Here’s a weird thing. In my head, I feel like I’ve long since fallen out of love with Beyoncé whilst still acknowledging that she is an incredible woman. The music of recent times hasn’t been to my taste and her other choices are her own to make, obviously.

Dance music isn’t one of my favourite genres but Moby is a big deal in that area and it seemed worth giving this a listen, given that new albums are quite thin on the ground at the moment. I quite liked it, it felt like the kind of album that you should sit back and properly listen to rather than as background music.

It’s so good. Brutal, and terrifying, hitting harder than the film does and delving deeper into the chaos theory that Malcolm expands on to the point where you are sort of left wondering if you have any control over anything.

Not sure about this one. It had to skip theatres and so Netflix snatched it up, we were keen to see it as part of the whole ’early release’ thing. On the surface, it’s a good enough movie, but I really think it only stands up because of the fantastic chemistry between the two leads, and their great banter.

I’ve had an Apple Watch Pride band before, but ended up not wearing it that much because it was one of the fabric ones and I’m much more comfortable in the Sport bands. So, the new 2020 Pride bands solved that problem with two fresh and fabulous sport bands in the rainbow colours. And the one I’ve opted for, it’s really gorgeous. Show your true stripes with pride!

For some reason, I thought I’d already this but it became clear quite quickly that I hadn’t. I was aware that the film (a classic and much loved by me) took quite a different path to the book, but I didn’t realise quite how out there the book was! It starts off pretty similar, football at school, the Vietnam war, etc. But then it drifts off to quite a different destination.

When I was checking my book review list for Roald Dahl works, I realised I’m a bit short on the complete package. I’ve read a lot of them, obviously, but not documented it. So I checked what was in my digital library and stumbled across this one. James was never one of my favourite stories, I think perhaps the giant insects weren’t a great incentive to read it over and over again.

This was a Reese Witherspoon book club pick and I thought it was going to be either deep drama or fluffy rom com but it somehow was a bit of both. Trying to span both genres meant it didn’t quite hit the spot for me, and the pacing felt a little off.

I’ve seen a couple more Mastermind editions that have caught my attention but this one came via a slightly different route. I wasn’t expecting to see a James Bond quiz on the BBC Sport site but there it was. Darren Bent, footballer, chose the super spy as his specialist subject but didn’t do as well as he might have hoped. The poor guy only managed to get one of his questions right, but having seen them, I’m not sure I would have done much better. The BBC have put an interactive quiz version of the questions up and have made it multiple choice - that meant I could actually answer quite a few - but faced with just the questions, like below, I would have done very poorly.

As I recently listened to my first Beatles album of this adventure, it seemed only fair to give their bitter rivals a go as well. I had somehow thought The Rolling Stones were a bit more rocky than this, but they’re only just straddling the rock/pop border.

I was looking forward to this, as I love the creativity of Hayley and previously Paramore. It was clearly a well thought out project with the three sections of five songs each coming together to make a full body of work. And you can feel the heart and soul that’s gone into it as well.

The first third of this movie was kinda dull, you knew the beats they were hitting, it was obvious what was going to happen, and you were just waiting for the inevitable. Once Will Smith turned into a bird, the comedy picked up a little bit, although it still felt quite slow going.

Listened to Michael narrating his journey around the world in audiobook form and it was lovely. Such a warm guide, gently travelling across the globe by boat and train, avoiding planes and desperately trying to keep ahead of the schedule. You can easily see Michael loves the people that he meets – spending so much time in close confines with people on boats, you’ve got to be open-minded and gracious and the hero that Palin is.

I’ve talked before about loving the Fleabag TV show, I came to it late and binge-watched both series in as small amount as time as possible. I hadn’t seen the original stage play, obviously, and missed out on the brief return to the stage that the lovely Phoebe Waller-Bridge completed earlier in the year. (Was it this year? I’ve lost all sense of time.) Anyway, that meant I was first in line to rent the play when it became available on Amazon Prime. National Theatre have been doing incredible work in keeping us all entertained during lockdown, and keeping theatre in the heart and minds of everyone. Their weekly theatre releases are something I’m definitely planning on talking about separately, but their video of Fleabag took a slightly different route.

This was an Oprah’s Book Club pick that I know I wouldn’t have found if she hadn’t recommended it. And it’s probably the first since I started playing along that I didn’t really appreciate. Charting the lives of the large Galvin family – mom, dad, and twelve children, six of whom developed schizophrenia – alongside how they helped in the fight to understand this challenging mental disorder.

It’s felt like a really long time since there was a new Star Wars thing coming out that people were really excited about and then when it came out, they actually liked it. Usually all you seem to get is moans from the hardcore fanbase about how it doesn’t work or doesn’t fit the canon. I feel like that’s not the case with The Mandolorian, and all I have heard about it is good. I can totally see why. I was gutted we had to wait such a long time to be able to watch this in the UK, particularly as it was impossible to avoid the Baby Yoda memes and I could only see from a distance the cuteness that was in store for us.

Second book in the Dirk Pitt series, I wasn’t too happy with Pitt’s antics on the beach but otherwise it was a great action thriller – kicking off with our protagonists taking on an old war plane and ending up with some submarine adventures too. The twists and turns along the way were great, double crossing and trying to figure out exactly what everyone’s dastardly plans are.