Set The Tape

Ask a dozen people what they consider to be the ‘Golden Age of Television’, and you will most likely end up getting a dozen different opinions. A standard answer to the question tends to be the era of live television drama broadcasts from 1947 to the early 1960s. Others may consider our current era of streaming services to be a high point in television history, and a new ‘Golden Age’, replete with prestige dramas.

Fandom can be a funny, fickle beast. Just take Star Trek, for example. The core tenet of Vulcan philosophy is the notion of IDIC – Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Yet it seems every time a new iteration of the franchise appears – with more than a dozen series at the time of writing, along with 13 feature films, a TV movie, and other media – there always seems to be some outcry about it not being faithful enough to Trek, or just being too different.

Some ideas are so brilliant that they encourage a sort of mental double-take. The reaction where you are instantly sold by the million-dollar pitch, yet also amazed nobody else had already tried to do it before now. Good Boy, the debut feature by director/co-writer Ben Leonberg, has one such million-dollar pitch: a supernatural horror film where the protagonist is the hauntee’s loyal dog.

There are but three certainties in life: Death, taxes, and the streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town being overrun with people flyering for shows during every Summer holiday. Yes, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is back, continuing that proud tradition which dates all the way back to 1947, with a programme of more than 3,000 acts packed into the roughly month-long run, across 265 venues. But with so much being out there to choose from, where do you start? Well, here are a few picks which caught our eye.

There’s been a murder… So commences the first essay in Writing the Murder, a collection of essays from a collection of renowned scribes, courtesy of Liverpool-based publisher Dead Ink Books. Essay collections are more popular now than ever – as more and more literary tastes become mainstream, so come the people willing to dive into analysis and exploration of those tastes – and Writing the Murder seems intent on celebrating them.

On the 7th June 1966 during a speech in Cape Town, Robert F Kennedy said “There is a Chinese curse which says, ‘May he live in interesting times’.” It’s doubtful that this ever really was a Chinese curse but what is of no doubt whatsoever is that we all live in interesting times.

The Black Orb – written by Korean scribe Ewhan Kim and translated by Sean Lin Halbert – opens on the horrifying sight of an ominous black globe engulfing people whole in downtown Seoul. The witness to this is Jeong-su, an adrift thirtysomething who soon finds himself traversing the country to reunite with his parents, all while watching as the sinister sphere continues on its path of destruction.

Murder? Mice? The title of former-KC Sally Smith’s debut crime novel, A Case of Mice and Murder, is slightly deceptive upon first read. This is not a cosy crime story, set in a charming seaside locale, but instead an homage to the Golden Age of mystery novels, situating itself somewhere between Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen mysteries and Christianna Brand. Tonally A Case of Mice and Murder is juggling two separate crimes.

Tasha Ghouri is perhaps best known for appearing on perennial summer hit Love Island and it’s perhaps fitting that her debut novel, Hits Different, is a sunshine-soaked romp about romance, overcoming adversity, and achieving one’s dreams. It even shares a title with a Taylor Swift song to boot (although the novel is notably cheerier than the song).

The premise behind Zulekha A. Afzal’s Dancers of the Dawn is pleasingly high-concept. In a fantasy kingdom ravaged in political intrigue and war, a troop of dancers traverse the desert on secret assignations. The twist? The dancers are secretly assassins hunting down rebellion and using their magical abilities to do so.