Sunday 21 May 2023

TV

Have I Got News for You
65x06 (19/5/2023 edition; extended repeat)
[Watch the extended episode (again) on iPlayer.]

Audio Drama

Hell Cats
1x14 Promises Kept [season finale]

Well, I thought that was really good overall. A nice mix of swashbuckling fiction (exactly what you want from a pirate story) and historical fact (there's plenty of gaps in the latter to be filled by the former). It has a very modern sensibility to some of the characters and their relationships, which I guess would rub some listeners up the wrong way, but it's actually fitting — these people were forerunners to modern ideas about the place of women, the value of freedom, and LGBTQ+ lifestyles; while they may not have actually used the same language to express those ideas, it's hard to think they would've disagreed with them. Besides, any work of fiction is as much about the time it was written as it is about the time it's set, so I think it works to view these historical people through a modern lens.

It comes to such a fitting close that I'm almost loathe to listen to the second series (which definitely goes beyond recorded events into the realm of total fictionalisation, from what I can tell)... but it's the same writer and lead actors, and it's set in a different but equally swashbuckling milieu (that of highwaymen), so hopefully it's as entertaining.

[Listen to it (again) on Audible.]

Comics

2000 AD #2312
The second half thereof.

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

I mentioned last time that this post would take a bit of work, because I'm massively behind on adding new acquisitions to my database, which means they're not easily factored in to the total running time — and (as is perhaps obvious) it's time for an update on that. Plus, I was away all of yesterday, so that hardly helped.

Anyway, slightly delayed, here it all is: this week's average-ish pile of new additions (by my standards — this many new additions every week shouldn't really be "average"!), plus the monthly check-in on the length of my collection.

Number of titles in collection: 3,092 [up 6]
Of which DVDs: 1,029 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,063 [up 6]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 260 [up 3]

Number of discs in collection: 7,594 [up 11]
Number of films: 3,790 [up 7]
Number of additional cuts: 316 [up 1]
Number of TV episodes: 9,589 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,053 [up 1]

Total running time of collection (approx.):
539 days, 23 hours, and 5 minutes.
(Up 2 days, 14 hours, and 7 minutes from last month.)

See you next week, faithful reader.