Benjamin Judge's judgements

Hello you. Happy New Year.

How is your year going so far? Pretty good?

Like everybody else who lives in my town, I went for a walk yesterday, around my nearest reservoir. There are no original ideas. I had a nice time though, and when I took a slight detour from the route everybody else was walking, I found a little pocket of quiet in a tiny wood, and within minutes I saw a redwing, a coal tit, a treecreeper, and a nuthatch. All great birds. Underrated birds.

Later on I stood on the path watching three bullfinches as dozens of people walked past, oblivious to them and the kestrel floating above our heads. I don’t want to sound like I’m judging anyone. They were probably nursing hangovers. And maybe they hate bullfinches? We can’t all like the same things.

I mention all this because, for me, 2026 is going to be about slight detours and looking at things. Noticing things. And then sharing those things with you. Starting on the 19th of January, I will be ramping up to three posts a week; a film review, an album review and a something else review. I won’t be reviewing new releases. I am going to highlight the lost and forgotten, the underrated and unfairly maligned, the heroic failures and, yes, occasionally, the irredeemably awful.

But first we need to finish with 2025. Next Friday I will tell you what my ten favourite albums of last year were and then, on the 16th, I will do a countdown of the 2025 films I watched in 2025, ranked from the worst to the best. All two hundred and ten of them.

Until then, here are five things from 2025 that I enjoyed very much, which you could enjoy in 2026.

• The New York Times has a better overall selection of games but Film Reveal, on the Guardian app, is my favourite puzzle at the moment. I play it every morning even though I am quite bad at it. You have to sign up for the Guardian app, which potentially puts you on a list that Reform will use for population control when they get into power, but you don’t have to pay for anything. Swings and roundabouts.
• This beef and pineapple curry by Chariya Khattiyot from Sainsbury’s Magazine was the best thing I cooked from a recipe last year.
• A TV series I enjoyed that you almost certainly missed was 99 to Beat, a Saturday afternoon game show on ITV. 100 members of the public all do a thing and whoever finishes last is out. Then, 99 members of the public do a different thing and whoever finishes last is out. And so on, until there is a winner. The tasks they complete are simple, silly, and often delightfully cheap. Who can throw a paper aeroplane the furthest, who can sharpen thirty pencils the fastest, who can catch a potato on a fork. It was the best thing that has been on ITV in years. Needless to say, they have already cancelled it.
• Lays Creamy Forest Mushroom Crisps are still the best crisps. Most supermarkets don’t sell them, though I think some branches of Morrisons do.  Look for them in Polish shops.
• Scarborough. Just the town, the place, the vibe. I went to Scarborough twice this year, once with friends and once with the family and both times it was the perfect location. It’s a great mix of highbrow (theatre, ruins of a castle, art gallery) and lowbrow (mostly the arcades, especially Olympia Leisure) with some lovely remnants of its past splendour (the funicular, the model boats naval battle in the park, the world’s longest railway station bench). The chips along the front are excellent, and there are lots of very good cafes (my favourite was Koda, which sells really nice vegan food). The restaurant in the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Eat Me Cafe, is superb.