Outlander – Common Ground
Settling Down, Surprises, Shock Endings – Outlander This Week is Back on Track. CONTAINS SPOILERS This week’s episode opens with Jamie (Sam Heughan) signing a deal with the British government to be the proud owner of 10,000 acres of land. All things considered, it’s a rather generous land grant though it remains to be seen […]
Continue readingOutlander – The False Bride
Brianna and Roger Almost Get Together, Claire Almost Gets Lost and Things Get Weird in the Woods. CONTAINS SPOILERS At the start of this week’s episode we’ve moved forward in time and back across the ocean to 1970s Scotland, where Roger (Richard Rankin) has sold off the house (presumably it’s not the manse then?) and […]
Continue readingOutlaw King
Bloody Battle Scenes and Gutsy Heroes Come Together in a Visual Feast. Medieval Scottish History gets the Hollywood Treatment Yet Again. Outlaw King neatly sums up the adage that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The eponymous king is Robert the Bruce, a thorn in the side to the English but a hero […]
Continue readingOutlander – Do No Harm
An Uncomfortable Watch, An Impossible Decision & the Pros and Cons of Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth. Contains Spoilers. Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) arrive at River Run and finally get to meet Jamie’s Aunt Jocasta (Maria Doyle Kennedy). River Run turns out to be an impressively wealthy estate but it […]
Continue readingOutlander – America The Beautiful
The moral of this week’s episode would seem to be: no good deed goes unpunished, though saying that, unusually for Outlander, the opening episode of Season 4 is rather a slow burner that’s if you discount the first 10 minutes or so and the last 5, neither of which proves fortunate for either of Jamie’s […]
Continue readingMY Comic Life – On the Road
Part and parcel of being a comic is travelling. Primarily because there’s a hell of a lot of it. If you can’t bear the thought of driving/sitting on a train or (depending on how well your career is going) on a Megabus for hours so you can have the pleasure of performing for 20 minutes […]
Continue readingIn Praise of Book Clubs
As someone who tended to confine her reading to the greats from Austrian and German literature, interspersed with the obligatory English language classic novel, and preferably only reading works by authors who had been dead for a minimum of 50 years (with the exception of Jörg Mauthe and absolutely anything written by Wolf Haas), I […]
Continue readingMY Comic Life – Edinburgh Festival, Slips of the Tongue and Throwing Up
Recent events include me doing a particularly bad job at recognising people at the Edinburgh Festival; ending up on a drip in Cardiff and inadvertently putting my foot in it when it came to raising money for a good cause. Latest most ‘Maureen’ moment has to be during my recent stay up in Edinburgh, where […]
Continue readingAnother Guilty Pleasure – Mar de Plástico
Fancy a melodramatic Spanish police drama with a brooding, action hero of a hunk as protagonist, set against the background of a corrupt and racist small town in Southern Spain, with a few unbelievable plot twists thrown in for good measure? Then Mar de Plástico (Plastic Sea) could be for you. Contains SPOILERS. Admittedly, the […]
Continue readingTips from Comedians on Surviving Edinburgh
In 2007, when I first visited Edinburgh as an open spot, I had no idea Edinburgh was the El Dorado of the comedy industry: that fabled place offering fabulous wealth and opportunity to any would-be comedy conquistador. However, just as the El Dorado of legend has proved rather elusive to all those poor sods who […]
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