Watching - May 2026

Jet Lag: The Game (season 3, 2022)

I signed up to Nebula to watch Tom Scott's new series and in the hope that perhaps there might be something there that wasn't just YouTube junk. But everything I've found so far is also on YouTube. Still, never mind, it wasn't expensive. This was recommended to me by B and it passes the time nicely enough - not brilliant but an OK watch. I'll probably watch more at some point.

Ghosts (season 1, 2019)

Revisiting a family favourite. Just as good as I remembered and several classes above what I see of BBC1 sitcoms these days.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

A fun and occasionally touching family-oriented action adventure.

The Sure Thing (1985)

Sometimes I just like to retreat to simpler times and this unassuming but incredibly sweet teen romcom is one of my favourites. I also found an early draft of the script online and the differences are really interesting.

Emma (1996)

This TV film makes four versions of Emma I've seen (excluding Clueless) and is probably the best and most faithful to the original book. While necessarily feeling somewhat rushed in the early stages - there's a lot to pack into one and a half hours - it doesn't feel like it's missing anything important. Kate Beckinsale is much better as Emma Woodhouse than any others I've seen and the production - by the same team coming straight from the previous year's legendary Pride and Prejudice - feels natural and realistic. If you don't know the book and want to start somewhere, this is where I'd recommend.

Taskmaster (series 17, 2024)

Reliably funny. I liked Nick Mohammed's good humour and occasional magic tricks, but the whole cast were good. Minor gripe though, and nothing to do with this particular season, but I do find it annoying that the last programme is always announced as the "grand final", when it's nothing of the sort: the competition is a league, not a knock-out.

Margin Call (2011)

I'd never heard of this film until I saw a couple of clips in a completely unrelated YouTube video, and so was pleased to find it streaming on Plex. If I remember correctly, The Big Short is a much better film about the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis but this is an interesting and different perspective from the inside of a fictional bank looking to save its own skin.

The Big Short (2015)

And just to check my memory, I re-watched this straight after. It's a brilliantly made film and an insane story, but what blows my mind the most is, bar a few name changes and one or two fictional scenes to make it a bit neater for film, it's all true. Information is Beautiful reports the film as 91% accurate (to the book, that is) and Steve Eisman - played by Steve Carell as "Mark Baum" in the film - recently did an interesting reaction video where he confirms most of his bits of the film, even the ones that you think are obviously just dramatic license.

Adam Hills: Inflatable (2011)

Amusing stand-up.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

Thor (2011)

Avengers Assemble (2012)

Still watching (gradually) the MCU films in order, but the problem with seeing them back to back like this is that they merge into each other slightly, which is a shame because they're all individually impressive, engrossing and beautifully made. They hit a certain spot like nothing else, I guess, but it's not always what I want to be seeing.

Our Welsh Chapel Dream (2026)

In which Keith finally gets to make some pots in his new pottery and Marj's glasses get improbably even larger. They seem a bit more present in this series, unlike last time when they felt like guests in their own documentary. They're both really sweet and it's gentle entertainment to see what they're doing. The intrusive and irritating recaps at the start of each episode and after each ad break need to go though. Are most TV viewers really morons with five second attention spans or is it just that documentary makers have a low opinion of their viewing public?

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

Sunday's film night with Z, and what better to share with my youngest than this jolly tale of gambling, crime, drugs and guns? Still very stylish and blackly comic.

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

Ian Leslie

2025 

A very 2020s take on a 1950s relationship

There are one or two books about The Beatles already^{[citation needed]} so it would take a novel approach to make this much-analysed subject fresh. Thankfully, that's what Ian Leslie has achieved, using 43 songs as jumping off points for an in-depth look at the central relationship in the band, that between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. It makes for an interesting, engrossing read, one I enjoyed very much.

But - you knew there was a "but" coming, surely - entertaining as it is, I can't take it too seriously. If you leave out the (very) well-known facts and biographical elements, what's left is basically just reams of speculation. Leslie - a psychologist, to judge by his previous books - has taken snippets of old interviews and pieces of lyrics that Lennon and McCartney both acknowledged were often just included because they fitted the music, and built upon them a castle of sand.

Leslie even points this out himself: in the chapter about "I Am The Walrus", he mentions how John Lennon:

"rails at 'experts textperts' - those who confidently offered interpretations of Beatles lyrics"

while literally doing the same thing himself in the same paragraph (and the rest of the book), apparently unaware of the irony. 

Overall, although it's an interesting approach, I'm not sure the conclusions are warranted based on the slender evidence. Lennon and McCartney met in the late 50s and barely more than twenty years later one of them was dead. What they went through together, no-one else will understand, but casting it in the light of a 21st century bromance is almost certainly not how they thought of it themselves. At least, that's my opinion. But what do I know, since I'm not them, and neither is Ian Leslie.

Reading - May 2026

Alex by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor (1987 - 2024)

I first came across Alex in The Independent, probably in the late 80s or early 90s. It was always a very sharp satire on City life and I've bought a few books from the early 2000s. Finding out that it was still being published as late as 2024 was a bit of a surprise - nearly forty years is some going! Luckily the cartoons - yes, all 9,021 of them - are on the Alex site and although it took me a while to go through them, I enjoyed it.

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie (2025)

A very 2020s take on a 1950s relationship.

Round Ireland With a Fridge by Tony Hawks (1998)

Gently amusing re-read that is a bit dated now perhaps.

The Sure Thing by Steven L. Bloom and Jonathan Roberts (second draft, 1983)

The Sure Thing is an little gem of a film that doesn't get much recognition. Having just watched the film and then the "Making of", I was curious to read the script. This second draft is fascinating because, although it contains most of the same scenes as the eventual film, most of the dialog is completely different; the characterisation is inconsistent, it's not clear why either of the main characters would like each other and in general it's a noticeably worse film. From things mentioned casually in the featurette, I suspect that Rob Reiner, then right at the beginning of his directing career, basically rewrote the script, or at least heavily guided the authors. It often seems unfair to talk of a "Rob Reiner film" but given the similarities in tone between this and When Harry Met Sally a few years later (which was written by Nora Ephron but developed in collaboration with Reiner) it seems fair to give him a reasonable amount of credit here.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (1933)

Having just watched the TV dramatisation from 2010 (with David Suchet), I wanted to read the book again to remind myself of the plot and see how close the adaptation came. Well, it's pretty close: the book has less action, which is fitting for a locked-room mystery, and although the solution is now well known, it isn't any less impressive from a story telling point of view.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis (2010)

Having just re-watched the film (twice!), I wanted to re-read the book. It's ten years since I first did, and the story it tells is still just as shocking. I don't fully understand the financial products involved (although I'm slightly mollified that the same is true for all but a handful of people in the world), but it doesn't stop this being a fascinating read. That said, while we hear from the people who figured out that the whole sub-prime market was a house of cards waiting to fall, we don't hear from anyone who built it. Were they just kidding themselves or did they understand what was going on but just didn't care? I suspect, and Lewis hints, that they won't or are legally bound not to discuss it, but it would be good to know. Lewis weaves a compelling tale and concludes, as any rational person surely must, that the issue, while complex, is not unsolvable. But there has to be a political will to solve it, and that's the thing that was - and is - really lacking. Why is that absent? Now there's a question.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis (1989)

One of the themes that strike me from both this and The Big Short is the way that the money markets (is that the right term?) too often end up being the tail that wags the dog of actual industry. The sub-prime crisis was caused by the banks' demands for more and more mortgages that could be packaged up into bonds, and similarly here we learn that junk bonds were so profitable that investment banks, having run out of them, artificially created more by engineering corporate takeovers that would then end up being financed by more junk bonds. I'm sure I'm over-simplifying things, but there's an imbalance here surely. Anyway, Michael Lewis is as entertaining as always while maintaining a sane view into the madness of the 80s (a madness that is mild compared to what later occurred, of course).

Going Home by Stacy Finz (2014)

Our online library finally has the last two books in this series and so, as a reminder, I re-read this first one. No surprises of course, but still a sweet and wholesome romance.

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis (2015)

The last in the trilogy of Michael Lewis books I got a week ago and the first I hadn't read before, Flash Boys (he does give good title) is just as interesting, this time about the next way that the financial markets conspired to make money at the expense of ordinary people - high frequency trading (HFT). Again, though, in taking the perspective of the people who uncovered the shenanigans (those who then founded the stock exchange IEX), we're left with the impression of shadowy demons behind the scenes who created the mess in the first place, but who we never hear from. Someone - lots of people - figured out how HFT could work and made billions from it. I can understand why many of them wouldn't be keen to talk publicly but surely enough would to make the genesis of the story tellable. As it is, this is like coming in to the story when it's about to end; we find out what happened but not really who or how. Lewis makes it excellently readable though, as always.