Tag: not a book

tv

Not a Book: Home Renovation TV

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I’m slightly left field today, because this is part recommendation, part recommendation request! I really love home renovation and home improvement TV series. I think I always have – I watched Changing Rooms back in the day, and Justin and Colin’s Million Pound House Experiment or whatever it was called, and I’ve been watching Grand Designs for probably two decades at this point. But British home makeover programmes have limits – they’re called planning permission and brick houses. So the real joy for me these days are American home renovation shows.

I remember when I first watched Extreme Makeover: Home Edition back in the day and being perplexed at how quickly a house could be built – because I hadn’t properly absorbed that many American homes aren’t made of brick or stone like the houses that I grew up in, but are wood framed construction with cladding. And of course this means that you can do a lot of changes very quickly – and that flipping homes can be a a much quicker and more viable business than it is here in the UK. When I was living in the US five years ago (!) I discovered Fixer-Upper and Flip or Flop and thus it really started – and these days on any given week I’ve probably got episodes of two or three different shows on the TiVo box that I can watch while I’m doing the ironing (if I’m not watching Miss Marple or Inspector Alleyn or Doris Day). At the moment it’s the final series of Good Bones, the latest series of Home Town and Christina on the Coast. But basically if people are buying houses and ripping them apart – either to renovate for clients or to sell on, I will watch it. I find them tremendously relaxing. Yes there’s loads of money involved, but they feel quite low stakes compared to some of other reality TV options that are out there and I like watching houses be transformed. Whether I’d live in a haven of white and grey is another matter, but that’s not the point really is it?

But obviously renovating houses – even in America – takes time. So there aren’t a lot of programmes in a season which means you need to have your eyes open for quite a few different shows. At this point, I’ve done all the obvious things – as well as the shows I’ve mentioned I’ve done Flipping 101, Property Brothers (although I find them a bit wearing after a while so small doses), Christina in the Country, Fixer to Fabulous, Rock the Block and Hollywood Houselift on the renovation front and then Selling Sunset (the early series when there were actually houses) and Luxe Listings Sydney on the buying and selling houses front.

So if anyone has any recommendations for more stuff that I can add to the list – let me know! Have a great Sunday everyone.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Colleen Rooney – The Real Wagatha Story

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It feels like I’m doing a documentary recommendation every other week at the moment (ED: you are) and this one is another football-related one after Beckham the other weekend, but hey the Wagatha Christie scandal transcended football (and wasn’t really about football in the first place) so I’m going with it!

In case you missed the original scandal, back in 2019 Colleen Rooney (the wife of former England captain Wayne) posted to her Instagram that she had been investigating the leak of stories from her private Instagram account to The Sune and had come to the conclusion that the culprit was “………Rebekah Vardy’s account”. Rebakah Vardy, wife of Leicester City striker Jamie, sued Rooney for defamation and the whole thing culminated in a High Court trial in the summer of 2022 and the whole case has spawned a string of podcasts, documentaries, dramas and even a West End show. This latest documentary, from Disney + tells Colleen’s side of the story across three parts.

There are elements here that have parallels to the Beckham’s story – Wayne has also been the subject of tabloid exposes and Colleen has been the focus of tabloid attention since she was still at school. But aside from that, this is quite a different beast. Colleen talks the viewer through her life with Wayne, the stories that started appearing in the Sun, the sting that she set up to try and prove who the source of the stories was and then the aftermath of her post. WHile the court case is estimated to have cost around £3m, it’s not life or death stuff and that makes it really good escapist viewing. I’ve already listened to a podcast about the case (the BBC’s It’s… Wagatha Christie) and the Channel 4 drama – as well as following the court case as it went on and I still found a few bits here that I didn’t already know. But even though I did already know most of it, it’s well packaged and it’s the first time we’ve really heard directly from Colleen and Wayne as well as their lawyers. I’m not saying go out and get a Disney + subscription just for this, but if you already have one, it’s a worth looking this up – or adding it to your list for the next time you do have access to Disney +.

Have a good Sunday everyone.

theatre

Not a Book: Old Friends

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This was my Tuesday evening entertainment this week and of course I was going to write about it, given that I bought the tickets the day that they went on sale and have been looking forward to it for months.

Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends is the West End run of the tribute show that Cameron Mackintosh put on with some of the best known and most loved songs from his long producing relationship with the late musical genius. It’s on a limited run in the West End with headline stars Bernadette Peters (her first ever West End show!!) and Lea Salonga (Princess Jasmine herself) along with support from West End powerhouses like Janie Dee and Joanna Riding.

And I was in musical theatre heaven – I’ve seen Company, Gypsy, Sunday in the Park with George, Follies (three times!), Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along so there were a lot of songs that were familiar to me. I have the Sondheim 80th birthday prom on the Tivo and have watched it more times than I can count, and I’ve watched the various documentaries about his life that have popped up in the last few years. So it was wonderful to get what is essentially a greatest hits concert – and to try and guess who was going to sing what – the programme has a song list but not who is doing which bits. And there are plenty of options for each one – as more than one of the cast have played each role. I was mostly right, but there are a few gender-swapped suprises. And it definitely brought home for me how wonderfully Sondheim wrote songs for older women. It’s not just Send in the Clowns, it’s Losing My Mind, and Everything’s Coming Up Roses, I’m Still Here, The Boy from and Ladies Who Lunch AND MORE. Just wonderful. I’ve been humming the songs for days.

How it will work for you if you don’t know your Sondheim, I’m not sure, so I had a bit of a hunt around to find the trailer for it with the most singing in it (see above!) but I think there are enough songs here that you would know – there’s West Side Story here too and A Little Night Music that you would probably enjoy it – and at least come away wanting to see the full version of some of the shows. I loved it so much I would go back again. And who knows, I might well go back and see it again.

It would be remiss of me to end this post without mentioning the amazingly talented Haydn Gwynne, who died this week and who should have been in this show. She had to withdraw days before previews started for “sudden personal reasons” – which sadly turned out to be a cancer diagnosis. And now, just weeks later she’s gone. I saw her in Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown and The Audience – and I know she would have been fabulous in this – because she was in the original tribute show last year. So leave you with part of her performance of Ladies Who Lunch from that show, which if you’re in the UK you can find on iPlayer to watch again – which we did on Friday night.

See you tomorrow everyone.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Beckham

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This week in Not a Book it’s (yet) another Netflix documentary. I’m sorry. I do try to mix it up a bit, but they’ve had a really good run and it’s what I’ve been watching this week. DOn’t worry though, I have other plans for next week and maybe the week after. I hope.

Anyway this latest pick is a four-part look at the life and career of David Beckham. It’s a decade or so since he retired now, but at his peak he was one of the best footballers in the world, as well as being one of the first footballers to become a truly global brand. He also married Posh Spice aka Victoria Adams at the height of both his and her fame. I mean if you haven’t heard of Posh and Becks, I don’t nkow where you’ve been for the last twenty five years, although these days it’s understandable if you know her mostly for her fashion line and him for… well being him.

It’s actually been really interesting in the office the last week or so trying to explain to people how big the Beckhams were at their peak. Really difficult. I’m old enough that I was there the first time – the World Cup 98 sending off, the purple suits and thrones at the wedding, the whole Rebecca Loos situation, everything. I don’t know that there is a modern day analogy really. Anything they did was front page news. Things they didn’t do were news. Victoria’s look was copied everywhere, David’s hair likewise – especially the bleached mohawk for the 2002 World Cup (How is that 21 years ago!). I think you get a bit of a sense of that from the documentary, but it’s really hard to convey. In a pre-smartphone world, they had cameras watching their every move, and the hunger for gossip or news about them was unquenchable.

Anyway, this has got all the access you could want (unless you want them to talk about the affair rumours) and has a sense of humour about it all. David is seen pottering around his outdoor kitchen cooking a single mushroom. Victoria is pretty frank about football (she doesn’t like football, but she likes watching David play football) and David’s teammates are also pretty frank about him. It’s hilarious in places – in the trailer you can see the bit where David says he doesn’t change, immediately followed by Fergie saying that he changed, and it’s not the only time it pulls that sort of trick. Roy Keane’s talking heads are consistently brilliant, as is Gary Neville on clubbing. Each episode is more than an hour long and they go by fast. It’s at its best when dealing with the early days and the Manchester United peak (partly because of those great talking heads from the teammates) but some of the Madrid and LA era stuff is good too. It’s not the whole story, but it is enough of the story that you come away feeling happy and as you’ve had a laugh you don’t mind.

Have a great Sunday.

streaming

Not a Book: Wham!

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A music documentary this week and I’m a bit behind because this came out early in July. But a good music documentary is always worth catching up on. And this is a good one.

This is the story of wham, as told by archive footage and interviews. I’m still sad that George Michael is dead, but there is plenty of archive material of him talking about the band, but there’s also loads of Andrew Ridgeley who comes out of this as just such a lovely guy. He and George were friends from the moment they met at school and he just seems to have been happy for his friend’s success and never jealous that George went on to solo stardom. It has great music, great stories and great archive – including scrapbooks of press cuttings collated at the time.

It’s only 90 minutes but it’s a really entertaining hour and a half, even though the story isn’t always sunshine and roses. But it will remind you how insanely talented George was and what a shame he’s not still around to make music. I defy you to come away without a Wham song stuck in your head. I was humming I’m Your Man for days!

Like so many of these things, it’s on Netflix and made for Netflix, so it won’t turn up anywhere else. Which means if you’re someone who cycles through which streaming services you’re paying at any given time, add it to your list for next time you have Netflix!

Have a great Sunday.

announcement

Sunday thought

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This photo is from this time a year ago, when I was off on holiday and also recovering from shingles. I’m not going to subject you to a picture of me at my worst (which was basically a year ago on Wednesday just gone) but suffice it to say that it was a really rubbish time for me personally and professionally.

There have been a lot of challenges over the last year, but standing here at the moment I’m pretty proud of myself for finding a way through and out the other side. I remember how beaten down I was this time last year and I’m pretty sure I’m in a better place now. I don’t often talk about the various people in my life, but a lot of the fact that I’m happier now is down to them and their support in various ways, so today I want to say thank you to them for all they do for me and for believing in me – often more than I do myself!

audio

Not a Book: Think Twice

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I’m back in podcast land for this week’s Not a Book – with Wondery’s series about Michael Jackson.

It’s nearly 15 years since Michael Jackson died – which felt really shocking to me, even though I know logically that it must be that long ago because of where I was living and what I was doing when the news happened. It would be understating it to say that Jackson’s legacy is complex, and for those of people who can remember parts of his career there probably some complicated feelings. But there’s also now a whole generation who don’t remember Jackson at all. And I think Wondery’s Think Twice does a really good job of setting out the whole story – the child stardom into solo supremacy and beyond but also the accusations of child sexual abuse.

Obviously the content of this is pretty grim at times so bear that in mind before you listen – it has a lot of graphic details from the court transcripts when you get to the abuse allegation episodes. The presenters are Jay Smooth, who presented a hip hop radio show in New York for nearly 30 years and is now a cultural commentator, and Leon Neyfakh, who did the Slowburn series on Watergate and the Clinton Impeachment and then went on to present Fiasco (all for Wondery). So it’s got a mix of music expertise but also investigative journalism that works really well. I think everyone of my age or older has an opinion on Michael Jackson, but I think this is a pretty even handed series – it doesn’t minimise his musical impact and legacy, but it also doesn’t minimise the allegations. I learned some stuff – despite having watched Leaving Neverland back when that came out and Janet Jackson’s documentary about her career – which also touches on what growing up in that family was like and having also read a bunch of stuff about Jackson over the years.

It’s a ten part series – if you’re not a Wondery plus member the final episode drops today (the 17th) on all the usual podcast platforms. If you do have wondery plus (which I do) you can get the ad-free versions – and you could have binged it already like I did!

Have a good Sunday everyone.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Untold – Swamp Kings

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The NFL season gets underway this Thursday with Detroit Lions at reigning Super Bowl champions Kansas City Chiefs, so to get you in the mood today I’m talking about the the new Netflix documentary about the University of Florida Gators that dropped on Netflix about ten days ago and which I watched across two nights this week.

The four part series is part of Netflix’s Untold strand and looks at the hot run that the Gators went on in the mid-2000s under coach Urban Meyer and with star quarterback Tim Tebow. It looks at how the team went from massive underdogs to double champions – and how it could have been more. There are sit down interviews with all the key figures and lots of match and locker room footage.

I’m an NFL watcher (although not really college football so much) so it’s maybe not a surprise that I would be interested in this, but why should you watch this if you’re not an American football fan? Well Him Indoors is emphatically not an NFL person, and he came in midway through episode 1 and got hooked and wouldn’t let me watch it without him. And I think that’s because it’s such an interesting slice of culture and sport. In the UK we have teenage sports stars coming through all the time – but they go into teams where the other players are a range of ages and experience. In college football everyone is between 18 and about 22 and in this period they’re also amateurs – they’re playing the sport alongside studying in the hopes that it will propel them in to the NFL. They’re also the rock stars of their universities – with students following them around campus and tens of thousands turning out to watch them play: the Gators’ stadium, known as The Swamp, has a capacity of nearly 90,000 – which is about the same size as Wembley Stadium here in the UK. So these guys playing for the Gators are basically like premier league footballers, but without the salary and while students. And if any of you remember what the rugby team at your university got up to for initiation (it’s always the rugby team, don’t know why) you’ll have a sense of some of the stuff going on in the locker rooms and the sort of ethos. It’s absolutely wild – and a little bit disturbing at times.

In fact a lot of this series of Untold looks pretty good – they’ve got a doc about another college football star – Jonny Manziel – and one about the Balco doping scandal that I think I’ll watch, and one about Jake Paul which I’m pretty sure I won’t!

Have a great Sunday everyone.

not a book, tv

Book Adjacent: Wolf Hall

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As I wrote about Crazy for You the other Sunday, rather than Dr Semmelweiss, I thought I’d redress the balance this week and add a bit of Mark Rylance to the blog. As I said last week, I think he’s the best actor I’ve ever seen in person and I count Wolf Hall as the start of when he started to cross the path of non-theatre people.

Wolf Hall is the adaptation of the first two books of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Thomas Cromwell rose from obscurity to be Henry VIII’s chief minister and then fell from grace after the failure of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. The mini series opens as Cardinal Wolsey is about to fall from power because of his failure to get the King’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled and follows Cromwell’s rise to power up until the death of Anne Boleyn. You see his origins in flashback and how he exploits the rivalries and networks of the Tudor Court.

I studied this period at A-Level and I can tell you it is some acheivement to make Thomas Cromwell a sympathetic figure, and yet the combination of Mantel’s writing and Rylance’s acting does it. I still haven’t read the final book in the trilogy because I’m not sure I want to see it all fall apart – and I’m struggling so much with reading things that are not cheerful or that I don’t know end well at the moment (by which I basically mean the last three years). When Hilary Mantel died almost a year ago, Peter Kominsky who directed this said that the script for the final book was underway, but there’s still no news on whether it is happening, and given that it was meant to film this year and Rylance has been in the West End all summer you can’t help but feel that it may not year have happened. But after the way they did Anne Boleyn’s beheading, I’m not sure I can bear to to see how they would do Cromwell’s execution anyway. We rewatched the series recently and I had to look away for that section.

Anyway, that aside, it’s well worth watching if you like historical dramas – and probably easier to watch it than read the books – which are very long and although beautifully written (two Booker wins and nominated for the third too) are not light reading. And you can play spot the locations too – I’ve been to Montacute House, Lacock Abbey and Barrington Court which are among the National Trust Houses that feature in the progamme, and the photo below is the steps leading up to the Chapter House at Wells Cathedral which we visited in January.

If you’re in the UK you can watch Wolf Hall on the BBC iPlayer, if you’re elsewhere, it’ll likely be on whichever streaming service gets BBC or PBS programmes where you are.

film

Not a Book: The Wedding Singer

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It’s the August bank holiday weekend here in the UK, which is one of the most popular times to have your wedding – in fact one of my co-workers got married yesterday. So today’s not a book is one of my favourite films set around weddings – the late 90s Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore classic: The Wedding Singer.

It’s 1985 and Robbie Hart (Sandler) is the singer with a covers band in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Their main gig is weddings, and as the film opens he’s performing at one the week before his own wedding. Newly employed at the venue is waitress Julia Sullivan (Barrymore), who Robbie meets during his break and promises to sing at her wedding which she is just beginning to organise. But it seems that they may both have chosen the wrong people to get engaged to…

I have watched this film more times than I care to mention – and it’s one of those films where if I come across it on the TV I can’t help but stop to watch it. It was in Amazon Prime a month or so back and I watched it again then. In fact, while I was writing this paragraph I went back to see if it was still on Prime so I could watch it again (it’s not, it’s back to being a rental, gnash). I can recite along with large parts of it because it was one of about half a dozen films that my sister and I had on heavy rotation on Saturday nights when we were teenagers – it’s in a group of films* where even now if I send a line from them to her and she’ll message be back the next. It’s one of a couple of Drew Barrymore movies that I love but it’s also maybe the only Adam Sandler film I’ve watched more than once.

There was a musical of the film made in 2006, which falls into the category of shows I’ve never seen but still know all the lyrics to – because it hit Broadway during the period where I was deeply into the BroadwayWorld message board and when YouTube was starting to get videos of clips from TV shows – which happened to include their Tony Award performance. Although the soundtrack to the musical is iconic, the musical has an original score – except for Grow Old With You which is from the movie – which I think does a great job of capturing the energy of the 80s songs of the movie. So enjoy their opening number – It’s Your Wedding Day – from the Tony’s and see what I mean.

Anyway, I love it to the point where I find it hard to believe that there can be any one out there who hasn’t watched it, but if you haven’t and you like the sort of romances that I write about on this blog and you like romantic comedy movies, then you should definitely seek it out at your earliest convenience.

Have a great Sunday and enjoy the rest of your long weekend if you have one.

*The other films in this basket include Bridget Jones’s Diary, Drive Me Crazy, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill and on the TV front large swaths of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.