I’ve long since been a fan of the Red Arrows, those crazy pilots that take to the skies for close formation flying and manoeuvres that quite frankly boggle the mind. The TV show that aired on Channel 5 this time last year was a great insight into the highs and lows of the group trying to get their display ready to perform. Injured pilots, new leaders and commentators, and a significant amount of delays due to bad weather, that’s most of the story that surrounds the Red Arrows.

I picked up tickets for the Strictly Come Dancing live tour back in November, when Strictly fever was at its height - in my household anyway. We were heading rapidly towards the finale with a good few names still left with a chance of winning (even though we all knew it would be Kelvin). Fast-forward to the post-Christmas slump and the tickets didn’t really make sense anymore. The Strictly mood was long-since gone, we’re in the middle of January, a traditionally low month, and the glitter ball trophy and all those sequins couldn’t seem further away.

James Corden’s latest riff off sees him take on Camila Cabello in a slightly fake debate about which is better for music - 1999 or 2019. You can see the results below but I’m pretty sure they came to the wrong conclusion. Even within the video itself, the older songs are so much better! Camila is a far superior singer to James, I’m sure he’d agree, but even she can’t make Old Town Road sound better than Smooth.

Having loved both For All Mankind and The Morning Show, I was expecting big things from the next AppleTV+ adventure – this time, a crime mystery with a podcast host at the helm. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite stand up to the competition even within its own broadcaster, let alone looking further afield. Let’s start with the good, though, the cast were great and they did the best they could with the scripts they had.

Stumbling across the TV show Modern Love was a weird experience – it was promoted on the Apple TV homepage and warranted further investigation. When we saw it was created by John Carney, who was also behind some of our favourite Dublin-based films, then it was a given we were going to watch this one. Anthology series’ aren’t always my favourite, but when they’re done well, like Black Mirror and now like Modern Love, they are a gem.

When Apple Arcade launched, I was very excited and blogged about it a couple of times. I intended to try ALLLLL the games, even though there were over 100 at launch and the collection was only going to grow. If I’m honest, I tried out a handful, mostly the ones mentioned in those prior blog posts and realised the rest didn’t really appeal. And now, for the moment, I’ve cancelled my Arcade subscription.

This week, the BBC aired a celebration of Miranda Hart’s self-titled sitcom that has been in our lives for ten years already. That seems like a bizarre amount of time to have passed but what would we have done without it? I remember bidding the show a fond farewell at the time it left our screens and it was so nice to revisit our beloved characters just a few years later.

Everyone has their own unique way of dealing with the apps on their phone. Some are very organised, keep everything in folders, download an app, try it, store it or immediately delete it. Others, like me, are a bit more haphazard about things: lots of apps that have been downloaded to try, lots of things taking up space that don’t need to, half-hearted folders and a bit of a mish-mash of everything going on.

This seems to be a bit of a tradition now, making a handful of resolutions on this blog for the coming year. I try not to put too much pressure on myself to achieve these things, because twelve months is a long time and who knows where we’ll all be at the end of it? But sometimes it’s nice to have some guidance, so I’ve got some more for 2020.

The flagship offering of Apple TV+’s launch was The Morning Show, a complicated drama set in a network television morning show and featuring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston as sparring and unwilling co-anchors. The show came in for a lot of early criticism, being a bit corny, full of tropes and stereotypes and generally not telling the story well. I didn’t get any of that. There were a few cliches, sure, and it did take a while to fully warm to some of the characters, but as with the other Apple TV shows, a couple of episodes in and I was hooked.