Miranda's musings

Going Cold Turkey Social media.   Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay.   You can’t escape it.   Every programme on TV helpfully puts its #suggestedhastag at the bottom of the screen and even David Dimbleby is reminded to mention it during Question Time each week – though I often feel he isn’t quite sure what Twitter is… Every Lent I like to give myself a challenge and this year I decided to quit social media.   I’m not a big Facebook-er unless shamelessly self-promoting whatever I happen to be doing in my career but I was feeling that Instagram was beginning to take over my life.   I’d love to know the hours I’ve spent scrolling, staring vacuously at my phone screen, it would be days’ worth of time.   And this is disturbing.   It is a literal waste of time.   Instagram does have its uses – there are some lovely communities on there and who doesn’t love to see a photo of a kitten?   However, it is also known as a hotbed for batteri...

I spend a lot of January and February each year running around to various cinemas, watching all of the films nominated for the best picture award at the BAFTAs and Oscars – it’s a fun challenge which takes me to locations all over London and to see films which I may not otherwise have watched. La La Land was arguably this year’s runaway success even though it didn’t (or did briefly) win the Academy Award for Best Picture.  However, talking to lots of people about it, I have noticed that it wasn’t the triumph with audiences that the press would have us believe.  Broadly my friends fell into two camps:  my actor and big theatre going friends tended to love it.  Everyone else was a bit more “meh”. I think the reason for its success at the awards is twofold.  Firstly, Hollywood loves a bit of navel gazing.    There were so many times during La La Land that I was wryly laughing to myself but no one else around me was.  I could really em...