Outlander – 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 reading

Outlaw 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 reading

Outlander – 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 reading

Outlander – 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 reading

MY 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 reading

In 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 reading

MY 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 reading

Another 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 reading

Tips 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 […]

Continue reading

MY Theatre Review – The Lieutenant of Inishmore

I’ve been a fan of Martin McDonagh’s writing ever since I saw In Bruges; a fan of Aidan Turner since Dead Romantics, Being Human and last but not least, Poldark. So, what could be better than a theatre trip to check out The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a play written by McDonagh and starring Turner? Two […]

Continue reading