6. 6th January 2025. Where you get your news

 I've just seen the Guardian's review of Playing Nice (started on ITV last night, yet another thriller because there aren't enough of those on TV - hey, if it sells and all that.) One star - Mind bendingly bad. Which has genuinely made me more intrigued to watch the remaining three episodes than I was after watching the debut episode. 

Background. The match that was not called off? Should have called the bastard off. Wet, cold, grim. Just the walk to the ground. Slush covered pavements, melted ice water in the road, cars possibly delighting in seeing how much of that water they could throw up over us. Three pairs of socks, running tights, jeans, walking boots, under armour, t-shirt, sweater, HEAVY coat, snood, hat gloves. Soaked. And three hours to go. 

Terrible performance by a previously dazzling Liverpool against a previously appalling Manchester United. Possibly the players were as convinced this would be a walkover as the rest of us were. It wasn't. It was just a bad draw. One down to 2-1 up to throwing it away. 

Anyway. Playing Nice. The brilliant James Norton playing a Cornish lad and occasionally remembering the accent. Two babies swapped at birth, two families finding out at three months, agreeing a solution without recourse to the legal departments that would have insisted on involvement (that's the point where I'd have decided it wasn't going to work and started again but nobody's paying me to write TV so there's a very high possibility that I'm wrong about that - and that may be why nobody's paying me to write TV).

I considered it a bit daft, bit of nonsense, that I wouldn't trouble myself with. 

Until the Guardian article. 

Having been the recipient of a three star Guardian review with an utterly scathing headline ('Liverbirds musical is just ho-hum' which is in complete contrast to the three star review of Mark Rylance's last play 'Rylance shines in drama' or similar) I'm very aware that the review is just the opinion of one person, that it doesn't reflect the experience of the room, or home audience as a whole and that the paper also thinks (along with much of social media) that 'The Traitors' is compelling viewing (I managed one episode - quite interesting at times, with a bizarre slice of It's A Knockout style shenanigans in the middle, file alongside Taskmaster as just a lot of pissing about) but...

To be this scathing? Got to watch it haven't I?

An update. A 9.50 pm update. We've binged the other three episodes tonight.

And? 

And it's not a one star show. It's not great but it's watchable. And given that we paid good money last year for a horror film that the entire world was praising to the skies (no names mentioned, work it out if you want, if you ask me I'll tell you 'it's not that one' and you'll never know) and it turned out to be the single worst thing I've ever seen in a cinema, let's leave all this at 'it's one person's opinion'. And, 'some people are paid to have opinions' - I've done it myself in the past. 

Maybe give things a chance, decide for yourself?