The Dictator (2012)

 My choice again. Best joke right at the beginning; "Your test results have come back, you are HIV Aladeen." Rest of the film; nowhere near as good as that.

Close the Coalhouse Door, York Theatre Royal

Oh god, this was awful. Just terrible and embarrassing. Terrible jokes and songs, twee and flat, embarrassing acting and stylistic choices. The worst part was how much the middle class audience seemed to enjoy it.

A Marvelous Year for Plums, Chichester Festival Theatre

A matinee in Chichester, I wasn't staying there again, two years previously I stayed in the kind of hotel people get murdered in, mismatched sheets on my twin beds and stains on the walls! Night terrors! I'm glad I managed to see this one, my favourite scene was probably the meeting between Anthony Eden and young John Prescott on board that cruise ship, apparently it's all true! Anthony Andrews was great, very emotional, liked the scene with the breakdown and liked Nick le Prevost and Imogen Stubbs smooching, I've always liked her loads. Don't remember much else, loads of coughing old people as it was a matinee and god it was hot in there, someone even had their westie with them, he looked like he was wilting, all fur in the boiling heat. May was about as hot as it got this year!

Gimme Gimme Gimme (1998-2001)

And now for something completely different. Remember this?
How the hell did it ever get on the telly?! It is so flipping rude!! But it is fabulous.
On Christmas day with my family I watched two episodes of Gimme Gimme Gimme and the Inbetweeners movie, we are obviously disgusting.
Watching this though has made me realise how things have become more conservative lately even in comedy. Rev is on it's third season.... Seriously?!
Can you imagine 15 years ago a gentle sitcom about a vicar's daily life, what the fuck? We are not a religious country!! These are Tory values!! 15 years ago we had Father Ted and the Vicar of Dibley, yes they were religious characters but above that he was a chainsmoker trapped on an island with a load of arseholes and she was just a fat woman who liked chocolate also surrounded by arseholes! Religion is always something that we have poked fun at, why the fuck are we making this affectionate show about a vicar as though it's good comedy?! Gimme Gimme Gimme would never get commissioned under a Tory government, it's lewd, vile, disgusting and hilarious.

House of Cards (1990)

Francis Urquhart is so fucking creepy and Machiavellian, he is AMAZING.

Ian Richardson makes my flesh crawl. But I love it!

I have never seen talking to the camera used like this before and it works because Richardson is so fucking good. When he talks to you, his audience, his conspirator, it's the fucking creepiest experience of your life, he makes TV better than theatre.

It is addictive. I want more. And the best thing is, I completely don't fancy him! He makes me feel sick, he makes me shudder with disgust, but I do want him, I want Urquhart.

The White Guard (by Mikhail Bulgakov, National Theatre)

I should be reviewing two plays today but I'm not because half way through The White Guard- which was one of the best plays I've seen for ages- I got an odd tickle in my throat that over night developed into tonsilitis and led to an exciting adventure of obtaining antibiotics through any means possible and unfortunately missing thursday night's performance of Women Beware Women.

We are fans of Russian plays, well, we are fans of the National Theatre's choice of Russian plays- seen a lot of Chekhov over the last few years at different theatres, I find it all horribly frustrating and sometimes I leave the theatre wanting to stab things. But at the National I have seen Philistines by Gorky and Burnt by the Sun by Nikitia Mikhalkov, granted both contained favourite Rory Kinnear but I've developed a taste for them now and The White Guard might have to be my favourite.

The play is about a family of Tsar loyalists (Tsarists?) in the middle of bloody civil war in the Ukraine. Yeah, they're all fucked.

The set design was astounding, Burnt by the Sun was a whole rotating house and beach, but this production made me wonder just how many miles deep the stage at the Lyttleton really is! A whole appartment with corridors leading to other rooms, a magnificent empty palace, a school gymnasium and a friggin' bombed out bunker! All these sets filled the whole stage! Where the hell did they come from!? It was seriously amazing!

Yeah, the design played a big part in making this play extremely good but the excellent ensemble probably could have carried it without bunkers, explosions and bombs dropping (nearly gave me a friggn' heart attack!), the actors were brilliant. I've seen Conleth Hill in plays before but suddenly as a charismatic love interest I was in agreement with Elena- completely in love with the big charming brute. And Paul Higgins doing his Jamie from in the Thick of It on stage but with so much warmth- just as much swearing but so likeable as a drunken captain. Justine Mitchell as Elena, the woman, such a hard part to play amongst all the men, she was wonderful, she stood out and was so real. Jeez, they were all so real and so was the friggin' war. But hell, it was still so funny! Poignant, laughably so.

I mean, those things have to go hand in hand don't they? If you are capable of understanding tragedy then you must understand comedy. Probably why those two genres are my favourites, and why I so enjoyed this play.

The Power of Yes (National Theatre)

Anna and I went to a sunday matinee to try and understand The Recession in more detail. The sunday matinee was full of wheezing pensioners, apart from all the coughing it was a good deal and there were lots of tickets available, I might go again- though not to The Power of Yes! I don't think I've ever felt more out of the loop in all my life!!

This piece of theatre- it's not a play, well, not really- got amazing reviews from all the critics, and I can see why, I just wish I had the brainpower to understand everything that was discussed (I am a bear of very little brain). I came out of the show and had to have a couple of parcetemol, I'd given myself a migrane from trying to concentrate for two solid hours. It was like an educational film there were a lot of jokes but a million facts and opinions, and it was SO fast!

The setup is an actor playing the author David Hare interviewing lots of figures from the banking world to attempt to understand why what happened happened! But there were so many people and some were explaining far more complicated things than others that a lot of the time by the time I'd grasped one idea the following idea had finished being explained and I'd completely missed it!

I wondered if all the actors knew what they were talking about. I understood what the women were saying but not all of the men, I wondered if maybe the women (being women) had said after reading their script "I don't understand this, please explain it to me." And therefore when they understood their lines they delivered them with the emphasis in the right places and I (the audience) understood too, whereas the men- too arrogant to ask just what the hell am I saying?- Learned their lines and delivered them with the emphasis all wrong so I didn't understand at all! ...I am such a sexist.

Anyway, it made me want to watch Drop the Dead Donkey. Good old Andy Hamilton, he knows how to explain the issues to the masses. Also Jeff Rawle was in the play and I was thrilled by this surprise.

Murder in Samarkand by David Hare (Saturday Play Radio 4)

Dramatization of former Uzbekistan ambassador Craig Murray's memoirs.

Good stuff, depressing of course but no-nonsense and the occasional nervous giggle. Not the sort of thing to listen to while drawing children having a jolly time at the cinema, I had pen paused over paper for the full hour and a half unable to draw while listening to this play.

And I'm glad I did listen to it, it was a gripping piece and Tennant is good at proper acting, a nice performance of a passionate but flawed man, glad he's back on the radio.

I hope those at Dundee University now (I attended 2004-2007) understand how good they have it with a heroic human-rights activist as a Rector rather than Lorraine Kelly.

The Thick of It (BBC2 Saturday nights)

I could watch it all day.

All five episodes of the current series are on the BBC iplayer so you can watch it all day- the hour long special I found on there a month ago was inspired.

I want to keep a notebook of all my favourite insults, I want to know these horrible disgusting clever bastards, I want to be them.

In the Loop was like a luke warm episode of the Thick of It, I blame the Americans. But Peter Capaldi on his own in a room screaming until the veins pop out on his eyeballs is television gold. Armando Iannucci you are my kind of genius.

Margaret (Thursday BBC2)

My favourite tv series is 90s newsroom sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey written by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin (now responsible for Outnumbered- which I also quite like, especially the sweet little girl). I want to say 'at last some faces to go along with the names!' but of course they are different (more handsome- in most cases) faces of actors rather than the actual Tory tosspots in Thatcher's 1990 cabinet. I begin to remember politics I'd say from 1994, and I know this because that's when I begin to get the current affairs jokes in DtDD (lucky too because the 1994 series of DtDD is by far the best series).

Margaret was over two hours of scheming Tory scum portrayed by some of my most favourite and most liberal theatre actors. Most perfectly cast I have to say, Oliver Cotton- who I have seen on stage before and who has walked past me in the National Theatre swishing his mane was quite obviously cast as Michael Heseltine purely on the basis of his amazing hair and eyebrows. Michael Maloney was extremely sinister as John Major though I was disappointed there was not a pair of Y-fronts in sight *nods to Steve Bell*. Was I really raving about how sweet and cute he was in Ken Bran's Hamlet? That guy is a seriously good actor, he was creepy as hell last night! One of the very best performances. 

There were times when I allowed myself to believe Lindsay Duncan was the harsh and ugly Iron Lady, mostly when the deep voice and mad steely gazes kicked in but most of the time I was thinking how cute and lovely she is and how she reminds me of my friend Alison (not when dressed as Thatcher I might add) I insisted a gross false nose would have done it but my sister informed me Linds "did not want to play a caricature". I think she did very well, she was cold and creepy- but she was still beautiful.

I'm hoping the BBC showed this to stop people voting Conservative in these desperate times. Come on Britain, surely we're not that desperate!! 

Watch online for the next 6 days http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hy18h/Margaret/