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LOL: L AST ONE LAUGHING UK We've  been here before . Ten comedians - five men and five women - are cooped up in a ' Big Brother ' style set for six hours in a competition to see who can keep a straight face while their rivals engage in quips or antics. Laugh once and you get a yellow card signifying you're on probation. Do it a second time, you receive a red card and are out. The comedian who lasts the longest without laughing wins. As anyone who saw  'LOL: Last One Laughing Ireland'  last year with Jason Byrne, Aisling Bea, Amy Huberman and Deirdre O'Kane will know, it can be sometimes surreal, surprising, crude at times but also often very funny. Versions of the show invented in Japan have been made in France, Colombia, Canada, South Africa, Iran, Australia, Italy, Germany, Nigeria, Mexico, Russia and Brazil. Hosted by Jimmy Carr, the British version features household names like ' This Country ' star Daisy May Cooper, Joe Lycett, Bob Mortimer and ...

  BLUE ROAD - THE EDNA O'BRIEN STORY If you were to ask Irish people in which field the island punches above its weight, a lot of people would undoubtedly say literature. With four Nobel laureates, five Booker Prize winners and a constant flow of literary talent, there's a lot of civic pride on both sides of the border about the international impact of its poets, playwrights and authors and their best works. Writers like Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Sally Rooney, Colm Tobin, Anna Burns, Conor McPherson, John Banville, John Boyne, Maggie O'Farrell, Sebastian Barry, Joseph O'Connor, Louise Kennedy, Claire Keegan and Enda Walsh are carrying on a proud tradition. Before them, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Patrick Kavanagh, John Millington Synge, WB Yeats, Brian Moore, John McGahern, John B Keane and Frank O'Connor blazed a trail. But so did Edna O'Brien who brought an authentic female voice t...

  TOXIC TOWN (Netflix) In normal times, 'Toxic Town' would have caused the kind of stir in Britain that  ITV's 'Mr Bates versus The Post Office'  achieved last year. A tale of citizens rising up and fighting shocking malpractice in their Northamptonshire town, Jack Thorne's four part drama on Netflix is the kind of miniseries about real life trauma that British television does so well. However just as it  started to make some noise , 'Toxic Town' was drowned out by the chatter around  another Jack Thorne scripted drama 'Adolescence' . While the attention that miniseries has got is understandable, this other Thorne drama is worthy of our attention. 'Toxic Town' tells the story of residents in the former steelmaking town of Corby who took the local council to court in 2009 over toxic waste contamination following the discovery of a cluster of children born with physical deformities. Like all good docudramas, it zeros in on a handful of fami...

  ADOLESCENCE (Netflix) It takes a certain kind of alchemy to deliver a great TV drama or film. And it's not that hard to figure out what it is. The right actors get the right script about the right story from the right screenwriter with the right director who brings it to life with the right amount of money and the right crew. It's that simple but finding that alchemy is not that simple. Nevertheless that's what happens on Netflix's four part English miniseries 'Adolescence' - a show that is so human and so perfect, it will simply make your heart crack and then shatter into a million tiny pieces. Written by the wonderful Jack Thorne who is best known for ' This Is England ,' ' The Virtues ,' ' National Treasure ' and ' Help ,' the show reunites him with actor Stephen Graham. It also brings Graham back to director Philip Barantini who he so memorably collaborated with on the indie cinema tour de force that was ' Boiling Point ...

SMALL TOWN, BIG STORY (Sky Atlantic) On paper, it looks great. Take a star from ' Mad Men ,' another from ' The Wire ' and put them in an Irish sitcom created by a star of ' The IT Crowd '. Add into the mix one of Britain's best screen actors and a squadron of Ireland's best supporting actors and you have a definite comedy hit, right? Er, no because sometimes what looks good on paper can end up being disappointing onscreen if the gags are just not up to scratch. That's certainly the case with Chris O'Dowd 'Small Town, Big Story,' with Christina Hendricks and Paddy Considine in the main roles and Clarke Peters in a minor one. Set in a Co Fermanagh town that wins the battle to provide locations for a ' Game of Thrones ' style drama about the Celts, it's handsomely shot by Jonas Mortensen and Ruairi O'Brien but unfortunately it's about as funny as a tax return. Hendricks plays Wendy Patterson, a TV producer and former res...

HACKS, Season 3 (Sky & NowTV) It's been a long wait - nine months to be precise since it aired in the US. However Season 3 of the Emmy and Golden Globe winning comedy drama 'Hacks' has finally made it to the UK and Ireland. This time it has new homes on Sky Go, Sky Max, NowTV and TG4 after failing to appear on Amazon Prime, the streaming service that housed it previously. Has it been worth the wait?  You betcha. (SPOILER ALERT!!) Season 2 ended with Jean Smart's legendary Las Vegas comic Deborah Vance riding the crest of a wave following the success of her comedy special. However right at the death, she shockingly cut loose the writer who helped her comeback, Hannah Einbinder's Ava Daniels. The third season finds Ava living in Los Angeles with her actress girlfriend, Lorenza Izzo's Ruby Rojas and writing for a hugely popular satirical TV show. Back in Vegas, Rose Abdoo's estate manager Josefina is worried about Deborah and warns Carl Clemons-Hopkins...

In the end, 2025's Oscars belonged to independent cinema and Sean Baker. A cult director with a taste for telling  stories about people on the margins of US society, his Palme d'Or winning film ' Anora ' walked away with five Oscars out of the six it was nominated for. Amazingly, a $6 million indie comedy drama about a Brooklyn lapdancer incurring the wrath of Russian oligarchs took Best Picture, beating the more conventional Vatican thriller ' Conclave ' and the epic immigrant tale ' The Brutalist '. Baker made Oscar history by personally taking home four Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing. And in the biggest surprise of the night, BAFTA winner Mikey Madison beat Demi Moore to Best Actress who had been strongly fancied to cap a remarkable career comeback in ' The Substance '. Naturally the significance of the Academy showering 'Anora' with five Oscars was not lost on Baker who ha...

2025's awards season will be remembered for being an unusually close race. Unlike the previous two years' contests which saw  'Everything, Everywhere, All At Once'  and  'Oppenheimer' dominate , there have been no runaway favourites with the exception of possibly the supporting actor and actress categories. As a result, predicting winners in this year's Oscars feels like an even more perilous parlour game. Nevertheless it is a parlour game, so let's not take it too seriously. Awards season has always been fluffy nonsense and rarely do the Oscars get every decision right. So let's just take a punt once again with some predictions - even if it is just for the craic. BEST PICTURE Awards season began with Sean Baker's comedy drama ' Anora ' slightly ahead of the pack, with the Cannes Film Festival's top prize,  the Palme d'Or  under its belt. Winning Cannes, though, is never a surefire indicator of success when it comes to the Academy...