This Blog in 2022.

About  Inspired by John at Dirty Feed, here's a look back at some of my favourite posts of the year on this blog.

Annotations:
An Editor's Burial: Journals and Journalism from The New Yorker and Other Magazines.
In which I made turned an anthology into a link list to save you from having to buy it.  I've had mixed emotions about The New Yorker since reading this book after the treatment of Evin Overbey and thinking about how some of the biographical essays and the behaviour of past editors could be viewed through a different lens.

The big kahuna, the one post which went massively viral this year thanks to being tweeted and retweeted by In Our Time's own Twitter feed and some of its contributors.  It was a beast to prepare but absolutely worthwhile given how useful its been to people.  Someone I know even has it bookmarked on their phone so they can use it when they're walking about and looking for something in their field to listen to.  Which reminds me that I need to do an update soon.

The title of the blog became even more ironic than ever this year as most of the bigger posts were lists.  This was a way of accessing a number of BBC programmes about Doctor Who as listed in the parish circular that month by Eddie Robson.

Speaking of lists, here's one which didn't really work.  Putting all of the Trek stories set before Discovery into chronological order seemed like a nice idea in theory, before you realise that so many of them are set in alternate realities, dream sequences or are subsequently wiped out after the timeline's been fixed.  Which is why I haven't included the second season of Picard.  That one is *complicated*.

By far the most popular post on the blog is the Doctor Who viewing order, bringing in a couple of hundred googlers per day when the series is on television.  So I thought I'd play to the gallery and do the same for Star Wars.  No one noticed.

I'll be returning to this in the new year once I've caught up on the BBC 100 posts.  Getting to touch the pages just as they'd emerged from Jaggard's print shop was one of the most spectacular moments of my young life.

After the success of the In Our Time post, I wanted to do something with one of the BBC's other large archives and settled on Cooke's life's work.  Again, no one noticed.

These were arguably three of the main exhibitions to visit Liverpool this year (I'm yet to see the fourth, The Turner Prize at Tate) and I went to town on all of them although it's pretty obvious which I was most comfortable writing about.  The opening line of the Doctor Who review has just made me guffaw.  Speaking of which ...

Having long abandoned even attempting to review the Chris Chibnall era of Doctor Who after finding myself repeatedly noting the same, some would say choices, others would say faults, I knew there'd still need to be words written about Jodie's swansong and right up until transmission, I had no clue what the angle would be.  Then, fortunately, Paul McGann made a cameo.

One of the few posts reacting to current affairs.  In the month's since I've become less and less interested in the current crop of working royalty, especially after the Harry & Meghan Netflix series and the King's first Christmas address in which he congratulated poor people for helping out other poor people while he's decreed that his coronation should be a full budget affair with every pomp and lashings of circumstance.

Twice this year I wrote similar posts (!) trying to explain how I perceive fictional multiverses are nestled together and this was the second, slightly more coherent attempt in the wake of Doctor Strange 2.  We'll see what happens after the next Spiderverse films are released.

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