So Much Further To Go

It’s 27 th December 1 . The grandiosity of Christmas is starting to fade, but the lustre of the new year is still in the distance. You’re bored. Your family are bored. Yet tradition dictates you need to collectively vegetate as a family, like Joseph, Mary and all those interlopers two thousand years back. You all despise board games by now. The pubs are all a little weird. It’s raining. Luckily, TV will help, filling the grey silence with technicolour chatter. And inevitably, there’s a 27 th December film showing. You know a 27th December film. These films can’t be too taxing – 3 days of turkey, Quality Street and alcohol have rotted your cerebral cortex too much to follow anything with a plot. They need to be bright, animated, and feature overly loud actors from American sitcoms. It’s Shrek 3, Madagascar, Kung-Fu Panda, the one with Bruce Willis as an animal, Bee Seinfeld. But the most 27 th December film ever is Despicable Me. If you’ve not seen Despicable Me, Steve Carrell ...

I am a Netflix sceptic. Every few months, as I begin to exhaust how much one person can rewatch the good series of Arrested Development, I consider cancelling it. And every time I get to that stage; something comes along that stops me from doing so. Last year, the promise of Gillian Anderson portraying Thatcher as the pantomime villain of the eighties kept the direct debit flowing. This year, it was glimpses of Heartstopper, the coming-out-of-age show based on Alice Oseman’s comics. I was expecting a sweet, mild, and innocent way to while away a few evenings. What I was not prepared for was a two-part binge to leave me feeling hollow and a wistful longing for what could’ve been. I mean, the show was brilliant. An adorable tale of a group of friends navigating their way through secondary school, centring around the anxious and ever-so-slightly-nerdy-in-a-TV-way 1 Charlie (Joe Locke) and his crush on Nick (Kit O'Connor), the star of the rugby team 2 . Beyond Nick and Charlie’s...