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.

A super short story from Roald Dahl, somehow I know of this one but I don’t know if I’ve ever actually read it before. I was aware of the concept of the Magic Finger, but had no idea of the story that unfolds around it. In short, a girl takes revenge on a family that goes hunting and they learn their lesson the hard way.

This film was entertaining enough and certainly fit the bill when it comes to cheesy Netflix Christmas rom-coms but it doesn’t really stand up to a lot of scrutiny. Firstly, the title calendar is barely featured in the second half of the movie. Secondly, I can’t help but think the story suffers from that Indiana Jones effect of everything happening anyway even if the calendar hadn’t have been there.

Was a bit nervous going into this one because the first movie, whilst fun wasn’t exactly a classic. And it’s about parenting which is probably one of my least favourite subjects. But it’s a Christmas movie, and we’re on a roll, so hey!

I had heard that a new version of Baby It’s Cold Outside was going to be released, with updated lyrics, but I hadn’t heard it until recently. Kelly Clarkson and John Legend have rewritten the old classic which has come under fire for some difficult lyrics that could be considered to fall on the wrong side of consent. I do get why the old song is problematic for some people. That line “what’s in this drink” can absolutely be taken out of context and if you read the lyrics at face value, it does sound like a guy trying to coerce his date to stay longer than she really wants to. But that’s only if you want to read those things into it, because the other view to take is that it’s a song from 70 years ago and it doesn’t actually mean any harm. Of all the songs in the world, this one wouldn’t be my first choice to cancel.

So, Anton du Beke has written a series of books, and would you believe it, they’re about old school ballroom dancing in a posh London hotel. It’s exactly what you would expect from Anton, really, the swoosh of proper ballroom dancers in the luxurious grandness of a swanky hotel in the pre-war era of misquiet and distrust.

I’ve read one Baldacci book before, and my dad recommended I invest in some more as he’s quite taken with the thriller writer. I picked up this one in an Apple Books sale and was soon caught up in the intrigue of it all. It’s an interesting style, because Robie is an assassin and the book has that arms-length detachment that comes with that kind of job.

I read this after seeing the film, which was a really good one. The movie is pretty close to the source material, with just a few tweaks here and there, but the main thing I took from it was that Simon, as a complex teenage character, doesn’t quite generate as much sympathy on the page as he did on screen.

Three books in one, this is a handy way of reading the first few books in the Malory Towers series. I have fond memories of reading these as a kid, although I didn’t remember the specifics, only that most of the girls were goody-two-shoes and adventures and midnight feasts were had. Actually, they really weren’t all that goody-goody. Even our heroine Daryl had a wicked temper that sometimes was totally misplaced.

Final thoughts! How can it be over already? I mean, I know it’s been weeks and we’ve all been on a journey and it’ll be quite nice to have my Saturday nights back but still… it’s all done! What a final show it was, kicking off with an incredible routine, and featuring Taylor Swift, plus all the old gang back for one more round including lovely Will!

Thank goodness, this movie is a return to form - well the form applicable to the Nativity movies anyway. It was really quite enjoyable, and moving in places, and actually has a timely story about immigrants and just treating people as human beings even in times of trouble.

What a terrible movie. Honestly, the Nativity series has so far been in the so bad it’s good category of brilliant Christmas movies, but this one does not stand up to the rest of them. For a start, the plot makes no sense, it’s far-fetched and contrived and the sequence of events is utterly ridiculous. I know you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief, but hey, I haven’t even started talking about the fact that Mr Poppy takes a bunch of kids to New York without permission or enough supervision.

Whilst we’re on a roll with female representation in our entertainment spaces, the Country Music Awards this year were an incredible show of women’s strength. Hosted by Reba, Carrie and Dolly, the show kicked off with a medley of songs from many, many, many women from throughout recent country music, including many I’d never heard of and need to know more about. (Who knew Delta Dawn wasn’t just the song Monica sings in a see-through shirt?)

I had seen in passing the news that James Corden was taking a break from his Late, Late show for other projects and guest hosts would be filling in. Alicia Keys kicked things off but it wasn’t until I caught the clips on YouTube that I realised just what a fab job she’d done. We all know already that Keys is brilliant, but her take on the year wrap-up is a step above, even if only for the piano reveal with Rocky theme tune.

Yes! What a great album to sign off the year with. If I’m honest, we were a bit lost for inspiration on how to wrap up the year, and so turned to many lists of greatest albums or best-selling albums. This featured quite highly but now I can see why.

I was quite surprised by this album. I’ve had a bit of a run of looking forward to some releases and then finding them kinda mediocre but this one was a step up. The one song stands out a little bit because it was so desperately overplayed, but actually the rest of it lives up to the pressure of that huge single.

I saw this promoted as a teen movie version of Love Actually, and although skeptical, I was pleasantly surprised that it lived up to that reputation. Perhaps the connections are slightly less tenuous, because this is about a group of teenagers from the same town who all end up at the same waffle house, but still, how they get there is the real meat of the story.

Somehow we have whittled the contestants down to just four and it’s time to wave goodbye to the one who will miss out on the final. Somehow it feels so soon that we have reached this point, and yet when you watch the titles it’s like “oh yea, they were in it, that was so long ago!” Time is weird. Anyway, here’s how my thoughts flowed as the couples tried out two dances in one night.

As soon as it hit December, I restarted my Netflix subscription, because there’s no way I was going to miss out on all those cheesy Christmas movies. However, the bonus alongside festive treats is catching up on the big series’ that were released over the last six months that I have fallen behind on. Starting with the final ever series of Orange is the New Black, bringing to a close the show that was one of the OG Netflix Originals.

This is a really lovely Sunday afternoon movie - gentle but emotional, with a good story but no crazy heart-wrenching moments. I dreaded that third act twist that would ruin everything before the happy ending but thankfully it wasn’t bad at all.

We watched the third movie in Netflix’s Christmas Prince franchise this week and… huh. It was an experience. I’ve obviously reviewed the film itself in the proper place but I wanted to expand upon this with a note about the fiasco that is the credits. The normal movie credits roll, that’s fine. Cast, crew, music and location credits. Then we get to the geographic specific stuff, the dubbing and additional voice credits.

For a sequel, this movie stands up really well. I think there was some concern in our household about how exactly a kid would get stranded in a completely different state, but actually the circumstances made sense. They wouldn’t happen these days, obviously, and there’s no doubt that the mother really needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror, but as setups go, it worked.

I love this album, not quite as much as the first from The Calling but really good. The first half I know very well, from a time when I would start listening to albums and get bored halfway through. So the first half is stacked full of tunes, and the second half, whilst it tails off for me, is still really good.

Wasn’t really on board with this one. The new albums haven’t been that inspiring for a few weeks now, and I sort of just gave in to listening to a bit of bog-standard pop. That’s exactly what this is, a few fun songs but for the most part just poppy background music.

I liked the concept of a couple that never meet but correspond mostly through notes. It was even better than I thought it was going to be, especially considering the two heroes don’t even meet until at least halfway through. But you’re gripped by the two lives, each having their own problems that somehow keep them apart but also drive them closer together.

This is such a terrible movie. Not even the normal fun but stupid holiday adventure. It’s badly written with terrible dialogue and goofy acting, and it really, genuinely feels like it was made by young movie students.

This psychological thriller tells the story of a very dysfunctional family dealing with a lot of history that was considered buried. The trouble is, the two big twists are both so obvious right from the start, that for most of the first half of the book, you’re just waiting for it to happen. I’ll admit that I didn’t see just how far it was going to go, nor how the ending would pan out, but for the most part, you’re not really left guessing.

Quarter finals, musicals week, the famous five, all the ingredients for a fun show. It’s amazing how short and sweet the broadcasts are now - just an hour of dancing and we’re done. But we’re getting close to the end now, who will miss out on the semi-final spot? Here’s my thoughts throughout the show. This is an opening. Anton and Kevin singing?? Craig? Bruno being under-utilised for a change? Too much!