"If you go down to the Street today, you’re sure of a big surprise..." @finlay24.bsky.social on Coronation Street. thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/26/l...

"John Curtice told Tories that the Lib Dems would ‘almost undoubtedly’ win more seats than them at the next election. If any party is going to be killed in the near future it is the Conservatives, though the verdict will probably be suicide." thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/29/1...

"‘Jack Hylton lived like Nero,’ noted his friend, comedian Arthur Askey, ‘and was, naturally, a good socialist!’" @alwynturner.bsky.social celebrates the best of interwar British dance bands. thelionandunicorn.com/2026/01/01/t...

Goodbye 2025! No vintage year, but kind to L&U. Thanks to @lordbonkers.bsky.social, Simon Matthews, Dan Atkinson, @finlay24.bsky.social, @hellothisisivan.bsky.social, @benfinlay74.bsky.social, @paulsaffer.bsky.social, @alantyler.bsky.social & @alwynturner.bsky.social. Splendid chap, all of them.

2025 hasn't just been L&U's 10th anniversary year, it's also been our most successful, with a record readership and four wonderful new contributors. Below I pick my Top Ten posts of 2025, in calendar order. But first, the story of how we got here.👇 thelionandunicorn.com/2025/08/02/n...

"Their opposition to the ‘Family Farm Tax’ appears in practice to mean opposition to any inheritance tax on land, and the Lib Dems have also taken the part of parents who pay for private education & owners of £2m houses" @lordbonkers.bsky.social on the Lib Dems thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/29/1...

"There was something terribly trivial about Y2K. The idea that humanity could destroy itself because it used six, not eight, digits for the date was culturally implausible, a far cry from the Book of Revelation" Our @alwynturner.bsky.social back in the NS👇 www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/1...

I've written another post for Lion & Unicorn. To celebrate its 10th year, the blog asked me to write about what the last decade has been like for the Liberal Democrats.

"Funnily enough, Robert Jenrick won the Newark by-election by putting Ken Clarke on his campaign literature and urging Labour and Lib Dem voters to lend him their votes to stop the 'extreme' UKIP candidate Roger Helmer" @residentadviser.bsky.social on great form👇 open.substack.com/pub/mbatangs...

"Their opposition to the ‘Family Farm Tax’ appears in practice to mean opposition to any inheritance tax on land, and the Lib Dems have also taken the part of parents who pay for private education & owners of £2m houses" @lordbonkers.bsky.social on the Lib Dems thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/29/1...

Happy birthday to Mike "Porky" Parry, "a licensed buffoon whose tongue and brain were in a perpetual state of civil war. ‘I think cathedrals are cathedrals,’ he’d declare, or he’d make reference to ‘Bordeaux – as in the tapestry’." thelionandunicorn.com/2024/07/14/c...

"‘I think I’ve just killed the Liberal Democrats,’ William Hague told his wife Ffion, after the Conservatives and Lib Dems reached their coalition agreement in June 2010." @lordbonkers.bsky.social on the fall and rise of the Lib Dems. thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/29/1...

"Superb, dark & melancholic... a complete piece, sequenced without gaps and plays like a contemporary folk/prog epic... Best of all is the brooding ‘Dark December’ which simply ascends with the advent of the horn solo" @benfinlay74.bsky.social on The Unthanks👇 thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/13/t...

"The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out of date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism & intelligence will have to come together again" — Orwell @alantyler.bsky.social on The Lion & the Unicorn👇 thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/17/o...

"Its drama came from small domestic tensions & minor community frictions. A love triangle between a schoolteacher, a shop assistant & a factory owner. Three old dears supping milk stout. A widow crying over an old pair of glasses" @finlay24.bsky.social on Corrie thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/26/l...

Glad Mum & I saved SLOW HORSES 5 for the dying days. The simpler storyline — no paternal revelations, no great MI5 conspiracy, just a twisty, high-concept terrorist plot with a few political red herrings — made for very easy & enjoyable viewing. And Lowden looks fabulous in those trackies.

"1965 was the peak year of the Daleks: they appeared in a record fourteen episodes of Doctor Who that year, as well as in the cinema, on stage, in comics and in two books." thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/25/t...

"The boiling fat warmth of Parker’s chip shop spilled into the streets. Glowing shop-front tellies were tuned to the wrestling, and outside the Salford Hippodrome a sign announced, ‘Strip, strip, hooray — we’ve nothing on tonight’" From @finlay24.bsky.social👇 thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/26/l...

What? No Ian Watkins?

"If the Daleks are derived from the Nazis, then Mavic Chen is clearly modelled on Stalin, his first appearance including a reference to a Non-Aggression Pact, which can hardly fail to bring to mind the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact" From @alwynturner.bsky.social👇 thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/25/t...

Actress Voliet Carson, who most famously played Ena Sharples in Coronation Street, died #OTD in 1983. Here's our @finlay24.bsky.social on the very first episode of Corrie, in which "The height of drama comes when Ena storms in to complain about a bad egg". thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/26/l...

"Its drama came from small domestic tensions & minor community frictions. A love triangle between a schoolteacher, a shop assistant & a factory owner. Three old dears supping milk stout. A widow crying over an old pair of glasses" @finlay24.bsky.social on Corrie thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/26/l...

The AMANDALAND Christmas special is a cracker. Everything a first-season Christmas offering should be: 30 minutes. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Temporary Yuletide profile pic

"Incidentally a happy Christmas to all of you at home." thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/25/t...

"We don’t write to order – just stuff that interests us. And when we get bored, we stop. The internet was made for man, not man for the internet" To mark Lion & Unicorn's ✨️10th anniversary✨️, a celebration of our wonderful writers (& of Britain).👇 thelionandunicorn.com/2025/08/02/n...

"‘If I was a producer on a show like that,’ Terry Nation reflected later, ‘I don’t think I would ever commit myself to a three-month Dalek story without a lot of other stuff in it as well.’" Our @alwynturner.bsky.social's Christmas present for Dalek fans👇 thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/25/t...

"Detective Sergeant Pierce has a Victorian-type dislike for drug dealers, and taps up rock musician Charley Small, who fingers an Indian guru, travelling to and from the Battersea Heliport as the likely source." It's the death of the Swinging 60s. thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/21/f...

"If I ever make a Christmas album, shoot me," said Eliza Carthy in 2021, just two years before she released the album "Glad Christmas Comes". thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/13/t...

Steeleye Span's "Gaudete" is one of only two top-twenty British hits to be sung fully in Latin... thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/13/t...

The Lion & Unicorn editorial board has convened to decide this year's festive Dalek special...

I love Steven Moffat's 'timey wimey' take on Dickens's ghosts, the magical direction – and the flying shark! But it's the unabashed sentimentalism about childhood, age & regret that makes 'A Christmas Carol' my favourite of all the DOCTOR WHO Christmas specials.

Fifty years ago today, Leo McKern made his first appearance as defence barrister Horace Rumpole in an episode of Play for Today by John Mortimer. Here's something I wrote about the resulting Rumpole series Rumpole of the Bailey. thelionandunicorn.com/2025/07/13/l...

"The creeping cold has fingers That caress without permission And mystic crystal snowdrops Only aggravate the condition." Some festive listening as recommended by @benfinlay74.bsky.social. thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/13/t...

Tonight on Dailymotion, BBC ghost story for Christmas 'A Warning to the Curious' (1972). @finlay24.bsky.social and I are agreed: Clive Swift is Britain's Paul Giamatti. www.dailymotion.com/video/x7cl5bv

What to buy for the dad who "doesn't want anything"? The Sunday Times has a suggestion.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and maybe to indulge in a little nostalgia, and certainly to gather round the hearth. @benfinlay74.bsky.social selects some music for the occasion. thelionandunicorn.com/2025/12/13/t...

Seventy years ago today, Hugh Gaitskell was elected Labour leader. "Last night the Labour Party was reborn," said the Daily Mirror. thelionandunicorn.com/2016/08/01/l...

DIVORCE. Homecoming gig, Rock City, Nottingham. Brilliant and lovely. (I once chatted with Tiger about pork scratchings in the Newshouse.)

"He knew, of course. He had always known..." John le Carré died five years ago today. thelionandunicorn.com/2019/07/06/r...

Our The Larry Sanders Show (not posted in jest)

Tonight on BBC iPlayer, DOCTOR WHO 'The Husbands of River Song' (2015). Probably the programme's second best Christmas Special. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...

The final night of Beer & Carols at the Malt Cross — one of Britain's few standing music halls — in Nottingham. Posted in excelsis.

Coming soon on @lionunicorn.bsky.social, my top ten British Yuletide albums and playlist... #musicsky #folk #prog #classical #traditional #topten #vintlcommunity #yuletide

"This is simple entertainment with no intellectual pretensions: we’re not talking Schindler’s List or Citizen Kane." Movie director Gerald Thomas was born 105 years ago today. Is his final film, Carry On Columbus, as bad as its reputation suggests? thelionandunicorn.com/2024/12/20/f...

You will be visited by three spirits.

Tonight on BBC iPlayer, DOCTOR WHO 'The Two Doctors' (1985). www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

Happy 65th to the best loved street in the nation