scaryblog

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's  Top 50 TV Shows of 2022 .   #30 : Anne At the start of this harrowing but rallying four-parter, Anne Williams (Maxine Peake) waves off her teenage son and his friend to go and watch Liverpool play at Hillsborough. The year is 1989, and we know how the day ends. Peake offers up a quivering performance as a grieving mother who spends 23 years campaigning for the truth to be acknowledged about the death of her son and the other 96 victims of the disaster. TV has surely never made a better case that you should not back down in the fight for justice. This isn't something I would have chosen to watch but, like Sarah Lancashire, Maxine Peake is an indicator of quality - although she does tend to be more of an indicator of both grimness and quality.  If she's in it, then it's probably not going to be a barrel of laughs - and, given the subject matter, it seems particularly unlikely in this case. It starts off with a lovely retro vibe -...

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 21/07/23 :  Beautiful and Brutal Yard - J Hus   Our second visit with J Hus - last time I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed it, so let's hope for more of the same this time. Hmmm - not quite, unfortunately.  I like the general sound and there's certainly enough variety on there, but I just found myself zoning out when I tried to listen to it.  I'm sure it's my fault - maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it and if I tried again, then maybe I'd get it.  But that ain't gonna happen, I'm afraid.  If you like Dave's stuff, then check this out because you might well like this as well - but it just didn't hit the spot for me.  It's got a cool album cover though (and quite a cool title as well - BABY for short). We're at #1 with a new entry this week, which somewhat surprised me - but it probably shouldn't because his last album got to #1 and his debut album spent 102 wee...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's   top 50 films of 2022 #18 :  Living Exquisitely sad drama starring Bill Nighy in a Kazuo Ishiguro-scripted remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru about a man dealing with a terminal diagnosis We're jumping forward on the list because, wonder of wonders, the grown-ups got some child-free time with the telly and decided to watch a "proper" film and this felt like one that we'd both enjoy.  It was on my list to watch without even being ordered to by The Guardian because a man dealing with a terminal diagnosis in 50s Britain feels like a role that Bill Nighy was born to play. It starts with some amusingly crowd and traffic free (except for buses) shots of London in the 50s and then we join a crowd of business men (all resplendent in bowler hats) on their way up to London for their days work.  Where they all squeeze into a very small office  maintaining massive piles of bureaucratic forms , overseen in a very frosty manner by...

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts. 10/10/99 : S Club  - S Club 7 Well this is a bit of a change of style from the previous two entries (but they all have something in common - as you'll find out later).  As I mentioned earlier in the year, I've always viewed S Club 7 in a kinder light than  Steps  - but I did go as far as to describe the latter as "surprisingly unannoying", so I'm now intrigued as to how overboard I'm going to go with my praise in this review.  Despite my obvious love of the S Clubbers, this isn't an album I've ever owned - 5/12. Well, it's not a GREAT album but there are definite moments of quality on there -  "Bring It All Back" is a high class opener and wouldn't sound out of place recorded by the Jackson 5.  "S Club Party" is an odd track because it has all the ingredients to be SUPER annoying ("woo woo - wave your hands in the air like you just don't care" - seriously?!...

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's  Top 50 TV Shows of 2022 .   #31 : Don't Hug Me I'm Scared It was a gamble to take a deeply odd YouTube show and adapt its surreal parody of kids’ TV into a half-hour comedy, but Channel 4 made it pay off admirably. A stellar cast including Phil Wang, Lolly Adefope and Edinburgh Comedy award winner Sam Campbell brought uproarious pitch-black laughs to the Technicolor sets and puppets, with episodes just as likely to leave you humming along to catchy ditties about jobs as gawping at grisly skits about death. Like nothing else that aired on television this year – or maybe ever. I've heard of this and  I know it's got puppets in it , but that's about as far as it goes - so who knows what we're going to get? And having watched it, I'm not entirely sure what it was that we got.  A "surreal parody of kids' TV" feels like as good a description as any, but it's not even the half of it. There are three main...

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts. 17/10/99 : Millionaires  - James Ar ound this time, f or some unclear reason, I just wasn't into James.  I'd like their earlier stuff but they'd fallen out of favour with me - with hindsight, this feels like a mis-step on my part because I enjoyed our recent visit and I have absolutely no reason to think I won't enjoy this.  Either way, we never owned this one - 5/11. And, yeah - it's a fine album.  Maybe not quite ever making it to "great" but there's some decent tunes on there and enough variety to not feel too samey.  I particularly liked "We're Going To Miss You" which has a definite Depeche Mode-ish feel to it.  And whilst I didn't particularly like the track, I did like the fact that the track they gave a Verve-like sound on was called "Vervacious". Once again, we're at #2 with a new entry in the chart starting a run of 16 weeks - unsurprisingly it didn't ...

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts. 24/10/99 : Us And Us Only  - The Charlatans I've liked a bit of Charlatans over the years but this is a slightly odd one - I did own it (5/10), but I'm not sure I really ever listened to it.  Exactly why that is may become clear over the next 52 minutes... Hmmm.  Well, starting the album with a 7:25 long track (with a really long intro) isn't exactly the best way to grab an audience - I expect they were just establishing their serious music credentials.  All the tracks are perfectly fine, but I think the problem is that I bought this after having bought Melting Pot, their best of - which is a cracking selection and there's just very few tracks on here that I'd swap for any on that album, with the exception of "My Beautiful Friend" which has some beautiful sweeping jangly guitars on it.  So I suspect I listened to it the once and then it just found its way to the bottom of my CD pile, never to re-emerge...