G2

Time-loop films

1 Groundhog Day (1993) Wander through the history of the time-loop movie and you always end up looping back to Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin’s miraculous fusion of formalist experiment and mainstream high-jinks. Bill Murray is at his unsavoury best as...

I had an eye-opening experience in the queue for the pub toilet

I had an unusual experience just before Christmas. I think it did me good. This was at a gathering of some old friends of mine, a group of dentists as it happens, but’s that’s not relevant. The assembled were all blokes, which is relevant. This was at...

Whole ’lotl love!

Women love Heated Rivalry – but why the sexist kickback?

I’ve never heard anything more sexist than the (mounting) reasons why women supposedly love the hit TV drama Heated Rivalry. Quick recap: if you’re a woman, or even if you’re not and don’t yet love it: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov...

I stopped saying no to new experiences

For most of my life, I treated taste as fixed. There were things I liked and things I didn’t, and that was that. Hobbies, foods and even social situations were quietly written off with the certainty of personal preference. But sticking to that...

The Damned

‘I was a toilet cleaner – then I was trashing a guitar on stage!’

The Brexit result came through – and my life in Britain fell apart

In the early hours of Friday 24 June 2016, the result glowed on my phone: 52%. Barely a majority, but nonetheless a verdict. I lay in my rented bedroom in Devon, still in pyjamas, watching everything I’d planned dissolve. When I saw the headline “UK...

I adopted a guide dog mum - and found community and confidence

Helen Smith was cleaning her bathroom and listening to the radio, some time after the pandemic, when a story came on about a shortage of guide dogs. The pandemic had made it hard to breed puppies. One vision-impaired owner faced a two-year wait for a...

Matt Damon’s best films

1 The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) This version of Tom Ripley is preppy, even buffoonish: he is no calculating psychopath but a square who stumbles into murder. So much of Anthony Minghella’s film seems to reflect Damon’s struggle to establish a vivid...

As Tehran was bombed, I saw a book I’d translated among the rubble

In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single image stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying halfburied in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still...

Why is it so perilous to be a person of colour on The Traitors?

It was the first real day of 2026: 2 January. There was already no shortage of mayhem, which is to say “news”, in the world, but the papers were united on one point: The Traitors has changed format and introduced a secret traitor. Looking at the...

TV

Can You Keep a Secret? Dawn French has made a new sitcom, which in itself should be cause for celebration. However, Can You Keep a Secret? is written by Simon Mayhew-Archer (producer of This Country and Funboys) and revolves around a couple trying to...

Songs about new beginnings

See the full list of 20 at theguardian.com/music 1 Fleetwood Mac – Don’t Stop (1977) There’s a hint of well-that’s-easyfor-you-to-say about Don’t Stop: Christine McVie wrote it for her husband, John, after their marriage had broken down, urging him...

Fireworks, flirting – and heaps of hope

‘We wish you peace,” said Tony Blair as the clock struck 8pm. It was New Year’s Eve 1999, a Friday night, and I was on the banks of the Thames. Britain’s fresh-faced prime minister – only two years into the job – was giving a gimmick called The British...

‘There’s no such thing as normal’

People find it very hard to talk about sex, so if someone takes the time to sit down and write a question, then send it to the Guardian for me to answer, I always regard that as a great privilege. In the 20 years of writing the column, I have been...

The best photographs of 2025

A massive fire broke out around 3pm at Wang Fuk Court, a densely packed housing estate in Tai Po, and I arrived about an hour later. By then, the flames were raging across multiple blocks, with thick black smoke. Unsafe bamboo scaffolding and foam may...

‘It’s dangerous and exciting!’

Prewn From Chicago Recommended if you like Wednesday, Fiona Apple, Giant Drag Up next European/UK tour kicks off in May Prewn, AKA Izzy Hagerup, often uses the word “dissociation” to describe her music – the disconnected emotional state embodied...

Our weirdest Christmases: whoopee cushions, wobbly gazebos and disappearing bikinis!

The top TV of 2025

50 The Last of Us (Sky Atlantic/Now) TV’s best ever video game adaptation screamed back to life with the year’s most traumatic killing off of a beloved character. Losing one half of the show’s central duo was no easy thing to move past, but The Last...

The Coldplay kiss cam couple

On 16 July 2025, Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot went to a Coldplay concert in Boston. You know this, I know this, my pop-culture-averse neighbour Norma knows this. Millions of people around the world are intimately acquainted with what happened that...

Smashed it! The 50 best films of 2025

50 Blue Moon Ethan Hawke plays with campy brilliance and criminal combover the lyricist Lorenz Hart as he spirals into despair after his split from Richard Rodgers in this latest work with Richard Linklater. 49 Happyend Teen romance and paranoid...

Paul Mescal is irresistible except for one thing

I want to believe in reincarnation because I want to come back as Paul Mescal. What it must be like to be irresistible. I’m sure it gets wearing, but I’d still like to give it a try, just for research purposes. Not so much for the carnal stuff, but for...

A pigeon fell out of the sky and led me to an underground rescue network

The plane pushed through wall after wall of sleet on its descent into Manchester. I’d had a sinking feeling during the flight that only deepened as I shuffled through the terminal. I resented having to be back in the city where I had grown up, after...

Making a joyful Christmas ad this year is no mean feat

There can’t be anyone skirting closer to burnout, more deserving of our sympathy and complicated respect, than the people who conceive Christmas ads. The goal is straightforward: make people feel good about Christmas so that they spend more than they...

For my final column, the most important thing I’ve learned so far – you must stay in the room

This is my last column for you. I am shocked and delighted that I’ve been allowed to carry on for almost two years, saying such controversial and true things as: the oedipal complex is real and all of us have one; psychodynamic psychotherapy is an...

Paul Dano films

See the full list of 20 at theguardian.com/film 1 Love & Mercy (2014) This Brian Wilson biopic ping-pongs between the 1960s and the 1980s, with Dano as the younger version of the musician. From Wilson’s perfectionism in the studio to his hounded...

The fine art of receiving a bad gift

To paraphrase George Michael, last Christmas my friend gave her sister-in-law a book. The sister-inlaw opened it, immediately said, “Oh I’ve already got this,” and handed it back. If you just winced, you are correct. Common decency dictates that you...

My train crashed – and then I heard a little girl crying

The moment I thought I was about to die came a couple of years into my 20s, when life was really just starting out. My best friend, Helen, and I were on our way to Blackburn to catch up with an old university friend who had recently moved there for...

Austerity is in the air again – and there’s a lot at stake

The Museum of Austerity, which has just arrived in London having toured Manchester, Newcastle and Bristol, is such a simple idea: you put on a headset, and walk into an empty room. As you walk around, holograms appear; a man about to collapse, clinging...

‘A producer grabbed me, and I thought, “Oh, for God’s sake”’

Roy ‘Wizzard’ Wood’s 10 best songs

1 Wizzard – See My Baby Jive (1973) “Roy Wood was a super-fan,” wrote Bob Stanley, approvingly, in his book Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. “He wanted to be all of pop, all at the same time.” It’s a brilliant summation of an oeuvre so rich...

Letters, texts, emails – the NHS offers everything except someone to talk to

I had this thing on the back of my shoulder, which a dermatologist at an NHS hospital looked at. He was brisk, verging on brusque. He said it was either one complicated-sounding thing or the other, but I distinctly heard the word “carcinoma” in there...

The Christmas taste test!

We should be able to retire words

The Oxford word of the year has been chosen, and it’s “rage bait”. This, as you probably already know, is the publication, usually online, of material designed to make people angry. It creates intellectual silos, drives deep social divisions, and...

‘It was extremely pornographic’

Films set on boats

1 L’Atalante (1934) A barge captain brings his new bride back to live on his canal boat in one of cinema’s most sublime flights of visual lyricism. While filming his only full-length feature, Jean Vigo was already suffering from the tuberculosis that...

'It crushed my confidence. I’ve never got over it'

'I put my gloves on and get on with it!'

I spent my late mum’s birthday just as she would’ve wanted

It would have been my late mother’s birthday last Monday, and because I am either astronomically stupid or fathomlessly wise, I elected to spend it at a public meeting about nuclear disarmament. I’d call it a blast from the past, except I feel...

Pub quiz cheating may not be a matter of life and death – but it feels that way

You probably saw the recent story about a publican who grew suspicious of a team that won his pub quiz every week. He and his staff set about trying to discover exactly how they were cheating. Do you fancy testing your knowledge and recall of topical...

Adrian Chiles

One night, late in the last century, I was walking home with some friends. We were living in Cricklewood, on Shoot-Up Hill – which remains my favourite home address. Anyway, a police car, blue lights a-flashing, came to a halt in front of us. A couple...

I thought my body was faulty. Then I took a shower with 50 strangers

When I was 15, I grew nine inches in nine months. My bones ached at night. I grew out of my clothes at a rapid clip, exposing skinny ankles beneath the bottom of my blue jeans. I went from being average height to towering over everyone in my class. I...

Dating shouldn’t be this difficult

It’s well known that dating apps are a nightmare, that hell is empty and all the demons are on Hinge, to the extent people aren’t really allowed to complain about it any more. It would sound like whining about getting run over after you couldn’t be...

I found my feet at 50, became a park ranger at 85 – and retired happily at 100

Betty Reid Soskin was 92 when she first went viral and became, in effect, a rock star of the National Park Service. She was the oldest full-time national park ranger in the US – this was back in 2013; she’d become a ranger at 85 – but she had been...

Aimee Mann songs

10 Choice in the Matter (1995) I’m With Stupid, Aimee Mann’s second solo album, was something of a bid for a broader audience, featuring moments inspired by Beck – but Choice in the Matter is straight-ahead distorted guitar alt-rock. No matter:...

‘I look deranged, but my baby looks happy!’

I thought I was a lesbian. David Bowie helped me realise my true identity

In 2011, a couple of years before the David Bowie Is exhibition opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I came out as a lesbian. Up until that point I had been exclusively dating men, one of whom I married. Two years later, I was in my...

We can’t just roll over to extreme demands

A thousand years ago, in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in a car accident – you may have heard about this – and the country went absolutely crackers. It was pretty spooky to watch, as people filed towards London’s Kensington Palace, her...

Only one thing is certain – that nothing is certain

If we want to build a better life, we have to be able to not know. Does that sound confusing? Perhaps you don’t know what I’m talking about? Good! That’s great practice. If you cannot tolerate not knowing, you run the risk of arranging your life so...

The least frightening films ever

1 Perfect Days (2023) A film about a man silently cleaning toilets for two hours has no right to be as beautiful as Wim Wenders’s 2023 movie, and yet it manages to be staggering. Kōji Yakusho wakes up, gets dressed, cleans toilets, eats lunch, goes...

Pasta or fish? Just make your mind up!

It’s common wisdom that you can tell all you need to know about a person from how they treat waiters. However, another restaurant-based measure of humankind has recently come to light: their dithering over ordering. The food and culture magazine...

I hated running – until I saw it through my daughter’s eyes

As a teenager, I was very much a “don’t put me down for cardio” girl. At school I would volunteer to be the goalkeeper as it required the least amount of movement. When it came to sports day, if I couldn’t blag a sicknote, I’d reluctantly sign up for...

These ugly spats over free speech are getting us nowhere

I don’t want to reheat Sarah Pochin’s remarks about Black and Asian people on TV, and I don’t want to situate the Reform MP within the new political spaces where it’s acceptable to prefer the sight of faces that are white to those that are not white. I...

I turned 70 and challenged myself to try 70 new things in a year

Alese Johnston was sitting on the couch one Sunday morning, reading the Wall Street Journal, when she came across an article by a 60-year-old writer who felt he’d become boring – always telling his friends the same stories. “I do that,” Johnston...

Ranked! Joanna Newsom songs

1 Go Long (2010) Touching on the story of Bluebeard, the exquisite Go Long excoriates the male pride, violence and stubbornness that condemns such figures to loneliness at the expense of those who try to love them. It’s one of Newsom’s finest-spun...

The best four hours I’ve spent on a train – or anywhere else

I’ve had this book lying around at home, Lonely Planet’s Amazing Train Journeys. I don’t think it’s been opened since I was given it six years ago. Of the 60 rail trips recommended from around the world, six are in the UK. Back then, the one that...

I gave up small talk and the world came alive

For as long as I can remember, I have found small talk problematic. It was boring at best and stressful at worst. A colleague commenting on the weather, when I could see for myself that it was raining. The postman asking: “How are you today?” An...

Why everyone will pay a price for Epstein and his buddies

On the eve of the publication of Virginia Giuffre’s book Nobody’s Girl, released six months after her death from despair, Buckingham Palace is apparently braced for fresh revelations. Many MPs are calling for a change in the law, to give King Charles...

Is it your muscles that are hurting – or your mind?

I have just got back from a run. I am shocked to write those words. I think it might have been a decade since my last. But I recently discovered that I have slightly high cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to do sweaty exercise regularly. This is the...

Ranked! Steve Coogan films

1 24 Hour Party People (2002) Coogan excelled in Michael Winterbottom’s free wheeling, fourth-wall-busting love letter to Manchester and its music scene, brilliantly scripted by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Coogan is perfectly cast as Mancunian Renaissance...

An evening of erotic performace art is an awful lot to take in

I’ve just texted my mum to ask why, on the morning of my wedding, she didn’t advise me to drill a hole in a wooden bridge and put my penis in it. No reply from her as yet. This is the morning after I was lucky enough to be at the world premiere of...

I nearly died – then decided to relish little luxuries

I used to have a drawer where the “nice things” lived: posh candles and fancy bubble bath; two flagons of Greek extra-virgin olive oil; that Aesop handwash, to bring out for visitors. A bottle of fizz gathered dust on the kitchen side and, in the...

Is this how Thatcher would have wanted to be honoured?

Yesterday, when Margaret Thatcher would have been 100 years old, many took a moment to replay their favourite memories: that time when she said there was no such thing as society; when she snatched milk from schoolchildren; that amazing pro-EU jumper...

I realised I was autistic – and finally found peace

When she was 39, Cathleen Caffrey saw a brochure at her Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It showed people who’d got sober in their 70s, talking about “how wonderful their lives were. That gave me a hope that I hung on to for a long time,” she says....

Poker face

The makers of Ballad of a Small Player talk ghosts, gambling and Fabergé eggs

My cameo on Inside No 9’s stage show was a living nightmare

I was on stage, alone, at a packed Alexandra theatre in Birmingham with no clear idea what to do or say for the best. And then I woke up. Except I didn’t because, to my horror, it was actually happening. This was the stage show of the television series...

I stopped censoring myself – and found true love

In 2008, I was in my mid20s and single. My relationships until then had all been fun, flirty and conflict-free – which was unsurprising, given I expended so much energy on male approval. Depressingly, this seemed normal in the 00s and demanded a...

The Conservatives are imploding – and the left should be worried

There have been times in living memory that Conservative leaders have sounded almost sensible – and times where they have sounded animal crackers, yet were still adored by their party. This is not either of those times. Kemi Badenoch left the crowd...

“Messiness is what makes you different

Lukas Gage on his eye-opening, explosive memoir of life as a young actor

Ranked! Marion Cotillard films

1 Two Days, One Night (2014) Cotillard harnessed the sense of gnawing inner dismay that gives her such believability in femme fatale roles to devastatingly realist ends in this Dardenne brothers’ tour de force (pictured below). She plays a depressive...

What can the UK teach America? How to lose at sport

Ifeel a bit sorry for Americans. They don’t go through enough national sporting despair. OK, they had an invigorating shot of misery last Sunday night losing the Ryder Cup, but that was a rare thing for them. It’s rare because they’re so dominant in...

‘I’m a hustler. I’m a grinder’

Teyana Taylor is – as she often says to interviewers – the entertainment equivalent of “a Glade plug-in” air freshener: put her in “any socket” and she will make “every room smell good”. And, at 34, she has the CV to prove it. After kicking off her...

“It was a bad dream – but I never woke up

I realised I didn’t need to be perfect

'I am a teenager, living in an age with war, corruption, discrimination, racism, sexism. But no one seems angry about it. People see the slight advances towards equal society as having solved our issues entirely and it just isn’t enough.” It’s March...

The party conference is back – and more pointless than ever

Conference season has arrived for the big political parties, and every year for the past 20 years, I have attended some, though not all, of it. I always have a lot of complaints, which I used to think were all different but in fact boiled down to the...