2025 felt like a particularly good year for television. I sit down every Tuesday and Saturday with my wife to watch whatever our chosen show at the moment is (we’ll have a “Tuesday show” and a “Saturday show”—Saturday usually allows us to get two or three episodes in, while Tuesday is better for shows we want to digest a little more slowly) and there were definitely parts of the year where we were spoilt for choice.

Last year I read 33 books (including a few graphic novels and short stories). Given it wasn’t too many years back that I was struggling to get myself back into a healthy reading habit I’m pretty happy with that statistic. While 2024 was the year that I plunged into folk horror, last year seemed to be the year that I discovered an appetite for autobiographies with three such books ending up among my favourite reads of the year.

I watched over 130 films in 2025, which is not bad going at all. Some of those were new films, some were rewatches, and some were films I was long overdue watching for the first time. It takes discipline and careful planning to get through this much time sitting on the sofa, so I have a weekly film viewing routine going which runs more or less as follows:

It’s the year that I turned 12 and the year that the internet was born, at least in a purely technical sense. The first mobile phone call was also made and there was a huge ‘video game crash’ which triggered the end of Atari and was partly caused by the rise in home computing (this is the same crash that, legendarily, saw thousands of ET game cartridges buried in a New Mexico desert).

If you were to delve into the deep, dark history of this blog you’d probably find a number of old reviews. Not so much in the last few years. While I am occasionally tempted to jot down my thoughts and feelings on the movies and TV shows I’ve watched or the books I’ve read I typically find, before the idea takes hold, that I’ve already moved onto the next thing.

1982. I hit my eleventh year. This one always feels to me like the year that pop culture really started happening. In truth it had been on the boil for a while, but with E.T. dominating cinemas, Michael Jackon’s Thriller storming the charts, and the debut of the CD this was a year of huge tentpoles for consumers to latch onto (or to be fed with until they burst).

On August 1 1981 MTV aired its first video. That video was Video Killed The Radio Star, directed by Russell Mulcahy and featuring a youthful Hans Zimmer on keyboards. MTV would change the pop culture landscape, comfortably landing its bootprint in the realm of cinema along the way, and there could be no surer sign that the eighties were coming for our films than this video featuring two people who, in very different ways, would make their stamp on movies over the next decade and beyond.

I turned nine in 1980 and was becoming a little more aware of movies, largely through sequels to movies I’d already enjoyed. That said, the hype surrounding The Empire Strikes Back was inescapable whether you were interested or not, and most other movies at the time I became aware of because of the posters everywhere. This was also a period of my life where I’d get taken to the USA for summer holidays (perks of having a parent in the travel business) which often meant I’d get to see movies months before they reached the UK—quite the privilege back then!

I’m taking a personal look back at the top ten films in every year since the one I was born in. We’re up to 1979. I was cannonballing towards 8 years of age. Margaret Thatcher took power in the UK, setting the political tone for the next few decades. The Ayotollah Khomenei was restored to power in Iran. Sony released the first Walkman, and Philips demonstrated the compact disc for the first time.