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Good news for the rat fans, as I recorded the New Year's Eve Twitch of Fun today. Yes, we cheat it and film it in advance, but if you choose the right time to press play you will get a countdown to the year 2026 and be able to share your celebration with me.
I had to prerecord as on the day I will be at the Hootenanny studio, wondering where everyone is.
I spent an enjoyable hour chatting to Ally about how our 2025s have been - his has mainly been in a box to be fair. I am aiming to do this more regularly in 2026. Not for you. Ally is my best friend and I feel I can really open up to him, so it's good to have someone you can talk to about anything for an hour. With no judgement. Because they are much worse than you.
I was wondering if a daily 5 or 10 minute show might be easier to do than a weekly hour long one. Probably not as it would still need me to work out what news story to do and it usually takes me ten minutes to get going. But an Ally and Rich's Newsround might be a useful service for the world. A blog, a short, 1000 words of a novel - if I can think of enough little free jobs to do then I can fill the whole day without actually doing any useful work.
The kids were at their grandparents today, but I wasted the afternoon doing nothing much. And then ate loads of chocolate and sweets. Still haven't dared weigh myself
We did get a date night, with an Indian takeaway (in for a penny) and a movie. We watched Sinners, which I hadn't heard of. It was an interesting film, playing around with genres and a few stylistic choices that didn't really work for me. Or at least took me out of the story or seemed slightly heavy-handed. I am so sick of formulaic films that I appreciate that this one was doing something new.
I quite liked it when it was shaping up to be a story of two wayward twins setting up a place for African Americans to dance and listen to music in the 1930s. It then turns into a vampire film, which I didn't like as much. Which again, I feel wrong about, because one of my favourite ideas is to do something that shifts genres part way through. I just wanted the twins business to be a success and the vampires ruined it (spoiler alert).
In hindsight I guess I still liked it. Being challenged and wondering about directorial choices is so rare in cinema now and it's not a bad thing to be unsure or unsettled or made to think.
I think I find it quite hard to enjoy anything in the moment and live my life retrospectively. Even though I'd like a version without the vampires (though maybe still with their music). When will people just make a film where everything goes right? Richard Attenborough runs a successful dinosaur park, zombies are defeated and society is rebuilt, African Americans in the 1930s convince the Ku Klux Klan that they're wrong and run a successful night club business....
I wonder why none of my scripts ever get made.
I hope regular RHLSTP listeners are enjoying me bombing the feed with stuff from my other podcasts. Hopefully it will make them grateful for the usual content. Someone has to suffer for my art and no way is it going to be me!
Annoyingly my show is at the same time as Stephen Fry being interviewed at De Montford Hall, and the bastard undercut me with his tickets £1 cheaper than mine. That show is sold out now, but surely everyone in Leicester is already going, so if you fancy an afternoon trip to the city that steals kings then come along!
