teardownthewalls

My favourite series of all time is Brideshead Revisited (UK, 1981). A beautiful and melancholic look at British high society between the wars, following the recollections of one Charles Ryder as he remembers his youth, college years and early adulthood. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews give star performances as the two leads, while John Gielgud and Lawrence Olivier steal the show as their respective fathers.

Also I’ve been quite partial to the range of crime dramas from N. European countries. Ones I can remember offhand include:

• The Killing (Sweden), award winning crime drama, multiple remakes
• The Bridge (Denmark and Sweden), possibly the apotheosis of the Nordic crime drama subgenre
• Endeavour (UK) a prequel to Inspector Morse
• Jack Taylor (Ireland) gritty police procedural from the West of Ireland
• Corp & Anam (Ireland) Irish language crime drama, great cast
• Wallander (Sweden, UK remake) long running series, also remade a few times
• Poirot (UK) charming and eccentric series based on the Agatha Christie stories
• There are many others but that’s what I came up with on the fly

Also Father Ted is something the Irish are still very proud of. 3 misfit priests are exiled to an island off the west coast where they get up to all kind of ridiculous high-jinks. The show lampoons Irish culture and society in the 1990s, and absolutely eviscerates the Irish Catholic Church.

And there is of course a wealth of excellent stuff out of the UK: comedies and dramas, sketch shows and miniseries.

Hard agree

Definitely not looking back having switched to Qobuz for streaming music. The quality is higher and the pay-per-stream beats most competitors as far as I can make out.

People lament the loss of podcasts but I never liked Spotify for podcasts, preferring to just get an RSS feed and use the podcast app of my choice.

Also a shout out to Le Chat, which is super fast and entirely adequate for everything I used to use ChatGPT for. ChatGPT grabs all the headlines with Deepseek and Gemini close behind but nobody outside my circle seems to have heard of Le Chat.