Little America, the anthology series on Apple TV+, came at the perfect time in our household, as we’d just finished indulging in Modern Love and were in the right head-space for the ‘different story every episode’ style. Little America takes the formula and applies it to immigrant stories across a broad range of ages and lifestyles and all walks of life in the US. There were eight episodes and it was wonderful how the same theme shone through them all – people don’t necessarily want hand outs, to take up too much space, or even necessarily to fit in. So much nonsense is spewed about them but at the end of the day they just want the same chances as everyone else.

I’m not sure this sequel lives up to its predecessor but it was fun enough to watch. It seemed to be more of a kids film than the first, which maybe had a few more levels. Here, we had quite long sequences of kids skating down the road causing chaos, and far too much quacking - either via duck whistle or in the middle of chants.

I’ve had a few disappointments over the last couple of weeks, so I wanted to listen to something I knew I would like - good old-fashioned 90s boyband pop. I fell for the manufactured BSB vs NSync rivalry back in the day but older and wiser I can now listen to it all and enjoy.

This album took so long to come to fruition! It’s been on our upcoming list for a couple of years but the release date kept being put back and back. Eventually, at last, it’s out in the world and was it worth the wait? Well, it’s certainly a lot better than I was expecting.

I heard a lot of good things about this book but I had to go for the audiobook option, read by Taron Egerton. Elton introduces his memoir by reading the introduction (and he voices the epilogue as well), but soon we are into the heart of the story with Taron doing an incredible job guiding us through Elton’s difficult early years, exciting early success, troubled drug decades, and post-sobriety contentment.

This book is a quirky little thing, but totally enjoyable. It took a little while to grow on me because initially, whilst I was absolutely seeing a lot of myself in the lovely Nina, I couldn’t quite see what was happening. But then I was halfway through and realised I was invested in a lot of things: the new ready-made family, the relationship with the quizzer, and the fate of the bookshop. Plus all conversations with the cat, Phil.

I wasn’t expecting too much from this movie, but we wanted something completely different to the previous film and I knew this was relatively well-liked and culturally referenced work. Plus, I like Emilio. It was a nice, family-friendly, sports film - competition, drama, people working through their issues, and eventually doing the right thing. I enjoyed it.

OKAY. Well. This was an experience. It’s one of the few films that we’ve watched where it was alright and almost enjoyable whilst watching but genuinely the second it ended, we started discussing, questioning, realising how terrible it was and growing to hate it. Quite remarkable.

Welcome to my first ever unrated album. The rules of the game are that I should listen to each album twice to make sure I’m not just making a snap judgement, and that those that grow on you a little have a chance to start to bed in. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get through this one a second time. I didn’t even attempt to, if I’m honest.

This is a reliably good album from Blossoms, they have a sound and they stick to it, so there’s nothing outrageous or unexpected as you travel through the ten tracks. It’s quite short, in this current climate of longer and more self-indulgent records, but it’s good.

I mean, look, you know exactly what you’re getting when you put on a Johnny English film. The bumbling incompetence of the super-silly spy is the perfect fit for Rowan Atkinson, but it’s not exactly high-brow art. On a tired weekday when you just need to unwind with something ridiculous, it’s the perfect film though.

I suddenly remembered that I had bought this book a while back, probably when we were playing the game on the PS4. It was a very quick and easy read, starting just after the tsunami that sweeps through Cozumel at the start of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Most of the action, though, takes place after Cozumel but before Lara’s plane crashes in Peru.

Overall, I thought this was a good album - you can rely on Keith to make a good guitar-focused country song, and there are some really top notch moments scattered throughout the album. However, I wasn’t a huge fan of the intro tracks, they didn’t really seem to add anything.

Mr C listened to this before I did and reported back that it was all about the 90s vibes, so that was me signed up almost immediately. It’s a good album, nothing particularly special, I don’t think, but a credible job considering the circumstances.

What a way to start, with Taylor Swift’s honest and revealing behind the scenes look at a tumultuous time in her life. It’s a really eye-opening piece and touches on lots of different areas: politics, music, feminism, eating disorders, family, loneliness, relationships, the media, everything!

The background: I love Peter Kay’s Car Share, I truly believe it to be one of the best TV shows of the decade. When I shared the show with Mr C, he was also on board - comedy and music aren’t too hard to argue with. On the flip side, one thing we argue about more than we probably should is the guilt of the protagonist of Richard Marx’s song Hazard. We’ve been talking about it for more than ten years and no doubt will continue for the rest of time.

This was so what we needed for our first movie of 2020. It’s a fantastic teen movie that just celebrates those angst-filled times, where you’re feeling misunderstood and like the whole world is against you, but there’s still joy to be found if you look hard enough. It had echoes of Edge of Seventeen and Easy A, that kind of vibe.

This week, I got to see The Bodyguard musical on the final stop of its UK tour. Based on the film of the same name, Alexandra Burke heads the cast with her phenomenal vocal powers bringing to life those infamous Whitney Houston classics. She was joined by Ben Lewis in the role of Frank Farmer (portrayed by Kevin Costner in the movie). And therein lies the problem. I was forever comparing it to the movie, which is an absolute favourite of mine.

Firstly, I don’t quite understand why Apple have classed this as a dance album - it’s surefire pop through and through. Just because Abdul was a dancer doesn’t mean she’s making dance music.

This is a solid album from Halsey, some great songs mixed in with lyrical interludes and some surprising guests - I was happy to hear the dulcet tones of Alanis in there.

I’ve read a handful of Dirk Pitt books but not for a long while and I thought it made sense to go right back to the beginning of the adventure. This book wasn’t the first one published but it is the first in Pitt’s timeline, and therefore we see him right at the start of his journey.

You’ll know by now, I’m sure, that I’m obsessed with Oprah’s Book Club. The interactivity between online books, the show, the guidance, the discussion with the author, all of it appeals to me. We recently saw the latest episode of the TV show, where Oprah talked to Elizabeth Strout about her latest work, and it was another good show - another, in fact, that Mr C enjoyed despite not having read the book. And a few days later, the next book choice has been announced, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

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.

Another audiobook listen, this time Graham Norton reads the story of an Irish family across the years, dipping between now and then and unravelling a mystery that spans a generation. The book gets off to an excruciatingly slow start, really could have used some tightening in terms of editing. But gradually, as the characters start to be revealed, the mystery deepens, and the story unfolds, it does become quite riveting.

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. As discussed recently, I am obsessed with that song, and you won’t convince me that Shawn Mendes can hold a candle to it.

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. (I really think Aaron Paul was massively under-used, only able to show his emotion in that final episode.) I also went along with the underlying mystery – it seemed to be a pretty good one. The twists and turns were fun, and I hadn’t really guessed the murderer although had a bit of an inkling in the final couple of episodes.

Yay for lovely Wham! I thought the album wouldn’t stand up to Club Tropicana, and while that is clearly the best song of the eight, the rest isn’t so far behind. There was a bit more falsetto than I’d expected but mostly it’s George and Andrew doing what they do best.

I really quite liked this album. It’s a strong pop offering, with Selena being her usual truthful, raw and honest self. I think, perhaps, there were no stand out tracks on the album, at no point did I think ’this is a great song’ but as a whole, I really enjoyed it.

I listened to the audiobook version of this - an intensely personal memoir from Nadiya Begum of Bake Off fame - and it was lovely to hear it read by the author, who has a lovely voice to listen to and a really honest warmth that you just gravitate towards. The structure of the book was slightly different to other memoirs, each chapter introducing Nadiya from another point of view - as a wife, a mother, a daughter, an in-law and much more.

Despite the title of this book, I hadn’t realised it was partly set in space. It’s not really a science fiction story though, despite the man being on a potentially one-way trip to Mars. Instead, it’s a story about humanity, about connection, about redemption and more than anything, it’s about listening, understanding, helping and just plain being kind.

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. The weird thing I found was that having the subscription meant I felt pressure not to try out any other apps until I had exhausted those that I was definitely paying for. And I didn’t want to play all of those apps. In fact, of the twenty or so that I tried, only two stuck with me, and only one of those had long-term playability.

There was a lot of Kylie on over Christmas, so I thought it was about time to dip my toe back in the Stock, Aitkin and Waterman waters. This is Kylie’s second album and it’s stacked full of that traditional late 80s, early 90s pop sound - a bit formulaic but still quite fun.

I just missed out on Stormzy’s album last year, so it was the first I wanted to get my teeth into for 2020. It’s such a good one. As always, because I’m not so good with lyrics, I feel like there’s a lot that’s going over my head, but even with that I still really enjoyed it.

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.

This was another pick in Oprah’s book club but it took me a while to get to it because I had to read the original Olive Kitteridge book first. I loved that one 100%, and this one lived up to the promise although I’m not sure I loved it quite as much as I did the first. It follows the same lines - a glimpse into the lives of a variety of people in a small coastal town in the US, including the title character Olive, who is getting older and dealing with many changes in her life.

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.

So I did this round up last year, quickly running through other posts that had already collected upcoming releases and pulling out films that I thought I’d be interested in. Turns out, I picked twelve films and only managed to watch half of them. Oh well! Let’s see how well I do this year. For reference, I’ve looked at the BBC, a selection from Total Film and a pretty long list on IGN.

It’s that time again! A whole year of music listening gets distilled down to a choice of five top albums and seeing if any of them can break into my top ten of all time. I don’t usually enjoy this process and this year hasn’t been any different, although if I’m honest, the choice was slightly less inspiring than usual. It felt like the year was very top heavy in terms of stand-out albums, and as I was reviewing my shortlist, none of them were really jumping out.

If you’ve followed my adventures, you know I’ve gone back and forth on the whole album thing, but I think getting to the end of my fourth year of listening to two albums a week (400 albums!) means that I’m on board. So I was surprised when I first heard that Sheryl Crow wasn’t going to make any more records after her latest release Threads. At the time the album came out, she talked of how happy she was that it would be her final release because the album features so many incredible guests and songs, and it was a good one. But she also said:

I don’t know if it’s just me, but Christmas television this year hasn’t felt as special or as inspiring as it sometimes does. There’s no Christmas Doctor Who special, and no superb films finally showing on TV, so that the only thing to look forward to seemed to be Gavin & Stacey. Wait a minute, Gavin and Stacey returning after a decade?? Yes! Many, many, many of us were looking forward to this welcome return to the twin worlds of Billericay and Barry Island, and thank goodness it was a perfect episode that wasn’t ruining anything that went before.

As is tradition now, I have come to the latest Sims game very, very late. When I talked about The Sims 3, it was about four years after the game had been released. I love a good late review, honestly. Well, The Sims 4 is slightly different. I did download it slightly nearer its release date - 2017, I think. But it didn’t work on my Mac, because it’s an old and rickety machine that desperately needs updating. The game didn’t play at all well and I participated for less than an hour.

I wouldn’t have heard of this book if it hadn’t been for the Netflix adaptation, that we enjoyed as part of our festive film roundup. It was billed as a teenage Love Actually, featuring all these intertwining stories and on screen that worked really well.

I was very keen on reading this after watching the TV show, and I was fascinated by the similarities and the differences. This was originally a set of short ebooks that has then been gathered together to make the first of a trilogy about Villanelle and Eve.

When I first wrote about For All Mankind, it was out of duty rather than enjoyment really. This was a show about the moon with a sprinkling of feminism and couldn’t have been made more for me if it tried. I talked of how the first episode dragged and the second picked up and by the third I was hooked. Well, I should have sensed the pattern there because every single episode that went by was better than the one before and by the tenth episode, the season finale, I was enthralled. We binge-watched the last three episodes together and I’m glad we did because the [spoiler-alert] cliffhanger with the guy in the airlock was spine-tinglingly good.

I think we all know by now that John Grisham’s books are hit and miss - the older, legal-based thrillers seem to work slightly better than the newer stuff, and then there’s that wobbly period in between. This book wasn’t one of my favourites but it was very readable.