Traitors UK Series 1 Rankings (Spoilers)

 This was up on Reddit in 2022 and I stumbled across it there. Even though the series is nearly four years old, and was watched by seemingly half the UK at the time, consider spoiler warnings for the rest of this.

The Stranger Left No Card (1952) / Carnival of Souls (1962) / Tales from the Crypt (1972)

 THE STRANGER LEFT NO CARD (1952)

Alan Badel gets off a train, in full Gandalf outfit, to bamboozle and entertain the locals in a sleepy town. As a semi-regular to this tradition, Badel’s talents are well documented. Before his untimely death in the 1980s, his piercing eyes haunted viewers of The Medusa Touch, Children of the Damned and The Three Cases of Murder. Even in less horrific roles, such as Day of the Jackal, or his shades of grey in This Sporting Life, he’s got a hundred mile stare that works so well, it is little wonder he was so often cast as ghosts or ghouls or, as in the case of Will Any Gentleman?, a hypnotist. He was still creating nightmare fuel by his mere presence on TV and film before his death of a heart attack in 1982, aged 58, and can now be summoned by repeating his name five times.

X-Files Season 2 Ranked from Worst to Best

Last time on Michael's blog:

Recently Channel 5 in the UK nabbed the rights to put 90s SF classic The X-Files for their On Demand collection. To celebrate, one of their off-shoot channels, Five Action, have been repeating the series from The Pilot onwards. My mum (and dad, and grandparents) were huge X-Files fans at the time, and me and Cat watched a bunch of them. Too many, in fact, as Eugene Victor Tooms was a bit too much for my 8 year old mind. Some my parents deemed too scary, some I saw trailers and ran a mile, so overall I've only seen about half the first few seasons and from Season 4 or so onwards it's a blur.

Well, if it is on TV...

World Cup 2026 Power Rankings

 World Cup 2026 power rankings

Instead of a group stage preview, here is a power ranking as they seem in vogue. My attempt to rank the 48 teams at the World Cup based on likelihood to win the Cup. Or do well. Or even advance in some cases. I like lists. Some teams suffer from being in bad groups, some teams suffer from being bad teams. I tried to be fair to everyone, and look forward to being proved utterly wrong within a fortnight! Onwards!

X-Files Season 1 Ranked From Worst to Best

 Recently Channel 5 in the UK nabbed the rights to put 90s SF classic The X-Files for their On Demand collection. To celebrate, one of their off-shoot channels, Five Action, have been repeating the series from The Pilot onwards.

My mum (and dad, and grandparents) were huge X-Files fans at the time, and me and Cat watched a bunch of them. Too many, in fact, as Eugene Victor Tooms was a bit too much for my 8 year old mind. Some my parents deemed too scary, some I saw trailers and ran a mile, so overall I've only seen about half the first few seasons and from Season 4 or so onwards it's a blur.

Well, if it is on TV...

Ozzy

 

Announcing: Dragon Queen

 If you think end stage online capitalism killing our old website means Other Side Books can't continue to publish new books and promote authors, you've never met a Scot. 

Introducing: Dragon Queen, the third book in the Greenwood Forest trilogy by Jo M. Thomas

Cover by Mark Hetherington.

You can find out more about Other Side Books here, and you can find the ebook of Dragon Queen on Amazon here, with a paperback to follow.

US Presidents Rankings (Part 4)

 After a lengthy health related absence, here, finally are the top ten ranked Presidents on my list. I managed not to make this 7000 words of "Noooo Trump" somehow.

US Presidents Rankings (Part 3)

 

We are now into the top twenty so let's look at a list of people who could have been a contender...

US Presidents Rankings (Part 2)

 Well I figure this list of people who didn't make top twenty is going to be controversial for some, so let's start with a biggie...

US Presidents Ranking (Part 1)

No sooner had I finished my ranking of the UK Prime Ministers (which was only in 2022, but three Prime Ministers ago) than people were suggesting I do the same for the US Presidents. Had they no idea of the research time, or the worry over who should rank higher of Millard Fillmore and John Tyler, or the hours spent looking for a positive of the Buchanan administration. In vain, I might add. List making is a very serious agenda in my book, and after two years, here is a ranking that will probably change tomorrow. I was taken aback by how many US Presidents I thought were a bit awful. As with the Prime Ministers, I have made a list of the achievements under their administration (the buck does stop here after all), and added and deducted points for my opinion on those policies. So, the Civil Rights Act would gain a lot of positive points (+150) whereas attempting genocide would score a vast number of penalty points. All of these points were added together to produce a rough list, before personal bias came in. Obviously, there’s a lot of personal bias. However, I was taken aback by the points differentials. In the UK version, there was 700 points separating top from bottom. Here? Over 2000. It may have been even more if not for the racism penalty clause, which kicks in with every different policy, and badly hurt a few Presidents, but to be fair, that’s their own damn fault. 

The Eccleston Era Pros and Cons

 The pros and cons of the one and only Doctor Who season with the ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston.

M.R. James Stories Ranked (2024 edition)

 I do this every year, but haven't posted the results on the blog for a number of years now. The position changes marked below are in line with my rankings from last year, which I posted on Gallifrey Base, and which were the first time I'd included the five extra stories not included in Collected Ghost Stories. I do like the idea, given the publication date of The Experiment, that, no sooner had M.R. James written in that collection that he didn't see himself writing any new tales, than he was immediately writing another. 

Without any further preamble, here are the ghost stories of M.R. James, ranked from least good to best...

Oh and fragments (Mr Humphreys, Game of Bear, etc) aren't counted. It's the 30 stories in Collected plus Experiment, Malice, Vignette, Fenstanton Witch and Speaker Lenthal's Tomb, the latter of which I feel is complete enough to make a judgement. All opinions are of course solely mine, so apologies if I slag off your favourite ghost story...

Election Forecast 2024

 

I said after last time there was no way I'd be doing a seat by seat forecast this time round. Not a chance. No chance in hell. And, of course, here it is. 

I've been aided in the task by, to be blunt, "doing an Iain Dale". In 2015, Iain Dale predicted every seat, with such gems as "Glasgow South West - safe Labour hold". In fact, my 2015 seat by seat was in reaction to his, an attempt to do better than Dale. And, that, I achieved. By which I mean we both sucked, and missed the David Cameron majority. Hell, I called 28 seats for the SNP "a great night for them", and warned the Lib Dems could wind up with as few as 25 seats, a target they haven't seen since!

But now that I am older and frankly more worn out, I see the wisdom in Dale glossing over the safe seats. And with the movement of traffic in the polls, hopefully I am as wrong in my "22k Tory majority, safe hold" projections as he was in trying to predict Glasgow in 2015!

Some seats are more interesting that others. For example, there's a three way marginal seat in Ayr, whereas Walthamstow will continue to produce North Korean like majorities for Stella Creasy! 

Oh and like a complete chicken I am not doing the Northern Irish seats because I lack enough knowledge about the likelihood of each party. Just the 632 seats of England, Wales and Scotland. 

French Traitors S2 Thoughts

LES TRAITRES (SEASON 2)

France, 2023

French Season 2 thoughts and contestant ranking (All Spoilers)

I was asked for my views on some of the Traitors series I've seen, so I'll start with the first non-English series I watched in its entirety. Thanks to the Traitor Archivist! The French second series is hosted by the chap who apparently hosted the first one, Eric Antoine. He takes a bit of adjusting to, as he plays the role of host in full vaudeville OTT manner. The subtitles actually read "Hahahahahahahahahaha" for twenty seconds straight at some points. But once you get used to his melodramatic presentation, he's a lot of fun - certainly better than the NZ host at least. Location is the French countryside so very aesthetic and lots of lovely scenery. The Missions are mostly what we've seen elsewhere. Yes, that damned Church one is back again. The Bank Job mission near the end was fun because it felt so different from other games at the time. Some of the games are given a nastier twist - the buried underground game includes cockroaches in the coffins. And one of the games includes snakes.

The Moonbase

 There’s absolutely nothing I can write that will live up to the expectations for this one, so with a few deep breaths:

The Moonbase

(episode 1)

Well, here we are then.

We’ve escaped from the nefarious plots of Zaroff, and now the TARDIS is crashing!

The Doctor desperately tries to stabilise his machine as his companions hold on for dear life, and succeeds.

The TARDIS took this opportunity to land.

Polly thinks the inhospitable landscape seen on the scanner is Mars.

The Underwater Menace

 The Underwater Menace

(episode 1)

Right, let's get back to the Troughton era.

It's episode 1 of that story Official Fandom always told us was a bit naff, until Episode 2 got found and it got reappraised as "our kind of naff".

Still, four months on from Gerry Davis murdering the historical, let's see if some B-movie shlock can improve things.

The Highlanders

 Gerry and Innes kill off the historical, in one final flourish. We are also introduced to a Doctor Who icon, not that you'd know from this.

The Highlanders

(episode one)

I knew sod all about this story, incidentally. Jon Arnold speaks highly of it, Jamie joins the TARDIS crew, and a very young Hannah Gordon appears in it.

It's Scotland! Culloden Moor. And there's a fight going on. Young Frazer Hines drags a man to safety. Another man rushes a red coat and kills him. Lots of people battle.

I thought Gerry Davis was aiming to lighten the historical mood?

Top 40 Chart Singles (1994)

The slowest moving project in the world continues. I'm not saying it's glacial, but George RR Martin has been mocking its deadlines...

The recap:

A number of years ago, when the BBC4 Top of the Pops repeats reached 1984 (they are currently on 1994) I realised that, if you took the best forty songs which made the Top 40 in that year, you would get an amazing playlist. Which you did. The challenge was then to create such a list for each year of the charts. To gnash in fury when favourite songs only made it to forty-two in the charts, and were thus ineligible. To try and get forty good songs out of a year dominated by Jive Bunny.

The elephant in the room is that this is based on the art. Some of the artists may not have been the nicest of people. I'm a Gerry Rafferty man. He was a musical genius, and also a complete sod. So far, I've only disqualified one song based on the artist, a Welsh one from 2001. Which is to say that, when we eventually cover his era, Michael Jackson will be there, because you cannot look at the eighties and ignore Billie Jean. However, R Kelly will not be appearing at all, because personally I think his stuff was rubbish. Hope that helps.  

This is the 1994 edition of this project. 1994 was a brilliant year for charting music in the UK. I can say this with confidence because I turned eight years old in 1994, and watched Top of the Pops religiously for the first time, and so all of the major hits are nostalgically embedded into my brain. This made a list of forty rather difficult, however. Where does nostalgia end and greatness start? For too long, I wanted to hang on to songs I liked because they reminded me of youthful times, while finding no room for subjectively better tracks. In the end, here is the best hodgepodge of 1994, and tomorrow I could give you a different list.

Columbo Episodes Ranked (Part 4)

 Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here we are, it's the final episode, the cream rises to the top, the A list. 

What we have left is solid TV gold and yet, someone sod still had to rank them.