Round-up Meander April/May '25: Good things to read, watch & listen to 📚📺🎧
Unsettling appetites, cold war paranoia, media travails
Hello, good evening & welcome!
(to quote my favourite presenter of Through the Keyhole1).
I'm back in your inboxes to share some of my favourite cultural goodies I've been partaking in over the past month and a bit. I'd love to know if you've read, watched or listened to any of these and if so, what you made of them.
And if there's something great you've been enjoying, I'm always in the market for a good recommendation (in fact the next book I've got lined up on my library app - a wildlife memoir written by Chloe Dalton called Raising Hare - is one I felt I just must get on order after reading a glowing review by
over at ).If you're reading in email you can just reply straight to this message. And/or don't be shy about hitting the comment button. Sharing is caring as they say!😊
So without further preamble, let’s crack on with my picks since my last round-up. You can read that one here if you missed it:
Reading
Book-wise, this was a fiction-heavy month, perhaps an unconscious rebalance after tilting more in the non-fiction direction through March and April.
The stand out title for me was a blackly comic short story collection by Eliza Clark, She's Always Hungry. I found it at once discomfiting and totally compelling in its exploration of all manor of dark human desires, roaming across genres from sci-fi and speculative fiction to grotesque body horror. I listened to the audio version which had a variety of differently-accented narrators, including Clark herself, deployed most memorably in one wild story consisting entirely of online reviews for a mysterious Chinese/Italian fusion takeaway called 'Little Chitaly'. Strong recommend for this one.
I also read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which my 11 year old had been given for Christmas and is one of those classic books I'd always wanted to read but somehow never had, so 'borrowed' - with his permission of course! And I finished Knife Edge, the second book in Malorie Blackman's Noughts & Crosses series, which is my year-long reading project for this year.2
I'm now a good way through the third book in the series, Checkmate. And I'm also deep into the first Miss Marple novel Murder at the Vicarage (no spoilers please!), inspired by finishing the Agatha Christie jigsaw I got for my birthday, which I posted about on Substack Notes...
And lastly I'm enjoying a dose of daily inspiration in the latest gem from
, Meditations for Mortals.On Substack, I was delighted/ fascinated to read two companion profiles by animation aficionado
of a pair of names that punctuated my childhood TV cartoon diet, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, co-creators of magical titles like Tom & Jerry, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, Top Cat, Yogi Bear and many more. And I loved re-visiting one of my all-time favourite Mike Leigh films, Abigail’s Party (a 1995 amateur production of which was my last ever stage role as a teen actor - I played Angela3) with . has launched a lovely collaborative series on artworks that have moved people and I very much enjoyed the latest installment focusing on an iPad painting by & encounter with David Hockney. took me on a deliciously droll tour of some of the other bunnies and hares of folklore who don’t get a look-in with all the fuss about the Easter Bunny. And my spirits were lifted by this ode to strangers (prompted by a dog whistling speech a couple of weeks ago by the British Prime Minister), encompassing a mission to preserve a radical social archive in Bradford, a city close to mine and my partner’s hearts, and neighbours coming together to protect migrants from an early morning immigration raid in Glasgow.
Watching
I can see from the scribbled list at the back of my diary that, without any particular intention of doing so, I've been choosing more fiction than non-fiction on screen lately too. That said, I did watch a couple of excellent feature docs, both released last year, that I would definitely recommend:
Victor Kossakovsky's intriguing and visually stunning essay film on the evolving story of building in concrete and stone, Architecton (which also inspired me to re-post my piece on the iconic 1980s meditation on civilisation, Koyaanisqatsi), and
Black Snow, a revelatory observational doc following an extraordinarily brave Siberian housewife-turned-citizen-journalist, who risks her own and her family's safety by going into battle against a Russian state determined to cover up dangerous toxic pollution caused by an abandoned mine in her home town.
And I finally got around to watching a docudrama series on the iPlayer4 I'd had lined up for a while - Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game, telling the true story of two double agents on either side of the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s.
This lived up to its billing as a thriller as nail-biting as any spy novel. There was some impressive archive, including contemporary interviews with the spies themselves and former aides to Thatcher and Reagan, plus new interviews with members of the Soviet, British & American intelligence services, some speaking publicly for the first time. And though my tolerance for drama reconstruction has been tested by years of developing true crime shows heavily relying on it, this was a pretty good example of its use, supporting but not overwhelming the factual material.
On the fiction side, I'd just finished Secrets and Spies when I got a reminder that Armando Ianucci's The Death of Stalin was leaving Netflix soon. I took this as a sign I should go back and watch this darkest of dark comedies about the chaos and backstabbing that followed the Soviet leader's demise in 1953.
And then, just to complete my own loose Soviet trilogy, I decided to watch Red Joan, a Judy Dench vehicle about Britain's longest-serving KGB spy. Except it turned out Judy Dench was hardly in the film at all, with most of it occurring in flashback to her earlier years as a young woman in the ‘50s. I can't in all honesty give this a glowing two thumbs up, as most of it was fairly forgettable, paint-by-numbers, period drama fare, despite the gripping nature of its source story. The few scenes with Dench and her adult son were excellent though, and the final scene was almost worth sitting through the rest of the movie for. Almost.
Elsewhere, the kids and I enjoyed two very different silent movies - some high-rise high jinks in 1928's Skyscraper (inspired by the discussion with
on podcast) and the gorgeous, non-anthropomorphised animal adventure through a flooded world in this year's Oscar-winning animation, Flow. And I saw a darker side to Ol’ Blue Eyes in Frank Sinatra's unflinching, Oscar-nominated turn as a reformed junkie (the drug strongly implied to be heroin) who relapses after being released from prison in The Man with the Golden Arm, from 1955.Finally, back on the small screen, I binge-watched Toxic Town, the Jodie Whittaker Netflix mini-series about the Corby toxic waste scandal (prompted in part by watching Black Snow). And my go-to light relief has been wallowing once a week in the absurd but hilarious shenanigans of Seth Rogen and his incredible ensemble cast in Apple TV's The Studio. Not every episode totally hit the mark but it was laugh-out-loud more than enough times to keep me happy through a period punctuated by several bouts of illness plus the stress of my 11 year old's SATS exams.
Listening
As an avid fan of bike racing, spring time is a golden time, from Paris Roubaix and the last of the Spring Classics in late April, to the Italian version of the Tour de France, the magnificent Giro d'Italia, that fills up three glorious weeks in May. And hence, much of my listening time of late has been given over to cycling content, in particular to the daily, whimsical travelogue updates from
(aka Ned Boulting, who's in Italy commentating on the race) in Never Strays Far and the original and best, on-the-ground race coverage on .Away from the skinny chaps in lycra, a couple of stand-out podcast episodes have shone a concerning light on the current media landscape and in particular on the increasing, overweening influence of celebrity on what's being made.
Around a decade ago, journalist Jane Marie was an editor at feminist website Jezebel when its parent company Gawker was brought down by a legal battle, bankrolled by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, over a sex tape it published made by the wrestler Hulk Hogan. In this episode of her podcast The Dream, she talks to the Gawker's then-editor about how it all went down and what's happened since.
And have you heard about the Prince documentary that will now never see the light of day? If not, it’s a 9 hour epic made over 5 years by Ezra Edelman, director of the similarly ambitious, Oscar-winning OJ: Made in America. Edelman was granted unprecedented access to the entire Prince archive by the bank administering the musician’s estate. But following the departure of the lead executive at Netflix and a change in management of the estate, the streamer has put Edelman's project permanently on ice, commissioning an entirely new, 'official' biopic in its place.
In this episode of Pablo Torres Finds Out, Edelman opens up about the whole sorry experience, the effect it’s had on him and what it says about the future of genuine independent documentary portraits of people in the public eye - as distinct from profiles made with/by the celebrities themselves (like the Netflix Beckham series and the recently-announced Amazon film about Melania Trump). It’s sobering stuff.
And in a similar vein, I found much food for thought - and not all of it hopeful - in a Substack Live conversation between
from and journalist Taylor Lorenz, about what traditional documentary filmmakers can/should learn from online content creators. Here's the replay:
A Short Film to Watch
Finally, I've seen several great shorts these past few weeks and as usual I'm choosing one to recommend for you. Kirsten Lepore's Hi Stranger was a viral sensation back in 2019 but in typical behind-the-times fashion I only just stumbled across it.
If you saw it at the time, I'm sure you'll appreciate a revisit with its mesmerisingly-smooth, clay hero. And if, like me, you were blissfully unaware, just sit back and enjoy. And let me know - do you find him (it?) comforting, creepy… or creepily comforting?
And that’s my round-up.
Till next we meet, I'll sign off with my own wish, echoing Hi Stranger’s, that wherever you are and whatever you're doing, everything's going to be OK.
With love,
Vicki x
Sir David Frost of course (Lloyd Grossman was definitely more of an acquired taste and I just couldn't get on board with the 2013 revival - sorry Keith Lemon!)
This is a fairly new tradition I've initiated, starting in 2021 when I read War & Peace a chapter a day (with 361 chapters it’s the perfect slow read project -
runs a wildly popular read-along on Substack if you fancy giving it a go yourself). The next year I read Les Miserables which also conveniently has 365 chapters. In 2023 I re-read all 6 novels by EM Forster, one of my favourite authors as a teenager whom I hadn't read again since. And last year I read Ursula K Le Guin's masterful Earthsea Cycle. As someone who beats herself up about doing everything too slowly, these long, slow, reading adventures are an absolute balm.Pictures of me and the rest of the cast in the local newspaper recently came to light but are best kept under wraps I reckon 🤣
Also available on Max in the US and, as far as I can tell, Amazon pretty much everywhere
Abigail's Party: many thanks for the mention!
Wow a busy round up. I’m going to try and watch Black Snow. I’m also trying to help my daughter get up to speed on the Cold War for her history so this was all v helpful and thanks for the mention Vicki.