Ranking Matt Smith Doctor Who

As a '90s sci-fi snob too young for the old series to have been part of my childhood and too old for the new one, I didn't much care for Doctor Who. I started watching it a few years in regardless, and found that this colourful children's programme had a daft charm, but it was only Steven Moffat's annual disproportionately excellent episodes that kept me slogging through the rest. When it was announced that he'd be taking over, handling all the big decisions and writing a lot more of it, I decided it was probably okay to become a fan.

When I started travelling long-term, those weekly illegal TV rips over dodgy hostel Wi-Fi were a bizarrely comforting reminder of home that kept me company on ludicrously noisy night buses across Vietnam, needlessly elaborate visa runs across Borneo and unconventional Christmases in Taiwan. Since I finally settled down, it hasn't had that same role to play, and without bespoke exotic context it's gone back to being that daft programme I'm too old to be watching again. But for a while there, it was great. Even when it was rubbish.

Here's what I reckon about The Subjective Best Era of Doctor Who. Matt Smith was the actor who happened to be in it at the time, plus friends. Thanks for the company.

Ranking the Ben Wheatley films

I liked A Field in England well enough, and foolishly allowed myself to believe the comparisons of Kill List to The Wicker Man, so was a bit disappointed when Ben Wheatley didn't turn out to be the folk horror master I was over-optimistically hoping for. I still admire his singular style though, even when it's unpalatably horrible.

Here are The Top 7 Ben Wheatley Films according to someone a bit less enthusiastic than someone saying that would usually be.

Ranking the Charlie Kaufman films

I generally go through life untroubled by thoughts of Charlie Kaufman. If you were to interrogate me in the street, I might struggle to recall who he is.

But when you notice that a couple of long-term inmates on your to-watch list are by the same person responsible for several other films you've found enjoyable, original and memorable over the years, it's worth paying attention. Even if just to take that arrogant 100% hit rate down a notch (or better still, maintain it).

Here are my The Top 7 Charlie Kaufman Films. Not many, but maybe he couldn't be bothered to pad it out with mediocre ones?

Ranking the Star Trek films

Oh good, something grown-up at last.

Ranking the David Lynch things

I first (knowingly) watched some David Lynch films as a teenager seeking out weird shit. Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead convinced me he was a genius, then Lost Highway cooled me off. A couple of years later, I finally checked out the Twin Peaks thing I kept reading about and the cycle started again. It's come and gone a couple of times since.

This was originally going to cover all 100 or so short films, advertisements, music videos, cooking demonstrations and other Lynch-directed paraphernalia, but it turned out I wasn't sufficiently obsessed. So here's a lukewarm Lynch fan's The Top 14 David Lynch Films and TV Shows.

Ranking the Stanley Kubrick films

2001 is one of my favourite films (best of luck, everyone), and I'd enjoyed a couple of the others too, but it was watching Jon Ronson's Stanley Kubrick's Boxes that made me want to know more about this passionate obsessive. It's a shame there's so little.

Here are my personal The Top 16 Kubrick Films. Three of them aren't films.

Ranking the Alfred Hitchcock films

I've always felt directors get too much credit in the film business. Not to the overblown extent of actors, obviously, but it's your screenwriters – writing their own stories rather than adapting tried-and-tested best-sellers they've bought the rights to – and your sleep-deprived, script-editing showrunners I've got the greatest respect for.

So I never gave much of a toss about Alfred Hitchcock. He just seemed to be a fat, limey knock-off of Rod Serling, who didn't even write the stories he was presenting. But when I watched a couple of films, liked them a lot, then watched a couple more, I started to get it. So then I did my customary thing and scoffed the lot over a couple of months, including all the deservedly overlooked ones no one ever talks about because they're not really worth mentioning. Still, maybe I can pluck out a couple of obscure gems for you.

Here are a non-filmmaker's philistine first-timer reactions (I'd only seen Rear Window previously) to The Top 52 Hitchcock Films. Shorts, collaborations, foreign language remakes, TV things and ones I couldn't find not included.

Alrightreads: Dead Stuff

Dead good?


John Metcalfe, The Feasting Dead

1954 / Ebook / 123 pages / USA

***

Exhumed from the Arkham House archive, this vampiric ghost story is billed as a criminally overlooked horror classic. That's going a bit far.

If it was bundled with other novellas and short stories in an anthology of obscurities, there's a good chance it'd be one of the stand-outs. If it had been adapted for a murky seventies TV anthology, it'd be fondly remembered. But as a stand-alone volume, it doesn't do much to justify a place on your classics shelf.

Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead

1969 / Audiobook / 190 pages / USA

***

Zelazny's anachronistic future has some unique touches that make it stand apart from your standard Silver Age sci-fi setting. So it's a shame he cheapens it by making it the story of an unenlightened 20th century businessman who made his way to the future the long way round and ends up doing preposterously well for himself in this brave new world. What's the male equivalent of a Mary Sue?

It might just be that I've watched a lot of Red Dwarf recently, but from prolonged suspended animation to psychic terraforming, I have a feeling this slim volume had a place on Grant Naylor's collective bookshelf.

Iain Banks, Dead Air

2002 / Audiobook / 408 pages / UK

**

Like Complicity, this is the story of an amoral local media figure who serves as a mouthpiece for the way Iain Banks sees things, and who gets caught up in an implausible cinematic thriller to keep things from getting too realistic.

There are some differences though. The author stand-in's monologues are now more tedious (even if he's basically right, I found myself siding with the interfering squares questioning the point of it all), his irresistibility to women comes off like wish fulfillment, the jeopardy's entirely his own fault, so he deserves what's coming to him, and Complicity wasn't turned around with ambitious haste to provocatively position itself as a landmark of Post-9/11 Literature.

It's not my least favourite Banks book, but that's only because he wrote Canal Dreams.

Various, Dead Funny Encore: More Horror Stories by Comedians

2016 / Ebook / 256 pages / UK/Australia

****

This feels like a more consistent collection than the first one, mainly because all the contributors understood what it was this time, and again it's mostly entertaining. The comedians don't all feel pressured to be funny, but it's better when they do.

Faves: Stewart Lee's 'Test Pressing,' Rufus Hound's 'Date Night,' Alan Moore's 'Cold Reading.'

Worsties: Alice Lowe's 'Carnival,' James Acaster's 'To Do,' Natalie Haynes' 'The Basement Conversion.'

The 10,000-word Star Trek dissertation I somehow got away with writing for my 'English Literature' degree

Other people's opinions cobbled together to fit a prescribed word count and passed off as original. Of no intrinsic value, but useful experience for my subsequent career. And I got to watch loads of Star Trek under the guise of research rather than having to read hard books.

My Top 10 Books, out of the minuscule fraction of books that exist that I've actually read, so far (maybe) EVAR!!!

Some books I likes.