Well, it’s that time of year again. As the New Year rolls around, here at Joz Norris Towers we like to look back at this year’s crop of “My Cultural Highlights of 2025” newsletters written by comedians on Substack and choose a winner. Or at least, that was the plan. But last night, after eating too many lentils and cabbages and doing a big fart in the cinema while watching Anaconda (I’m not sorry because the kid next to me kept turning his torch on to read the details on a pile of receipts for some reason, and then left five minutes before the end, probably because of the big fart), I had a strange dream. In the dream, I died and went to Heaven and when I got there I really needed the toilet (this, I think, was the lentils worming their way into my subconscious, although I dream about toilets a lot of the time anyway). The ghost of Alan Rickman escorted me to Heaven’s toilet, then when I asked him where the toilet roll was, bent me over and pulled a tea-towel out of my arse and handed it to me with a beatific smile. I woke up missing him, and determined to be kinder in 2026.

And so, rather than competitively ranking and judging the cultural highlights of others, I have decided to clog up your inboxes with my own – an outward-looking act, a generous act, one driven by an impulse to share and connect, not criticise and tear down. Did you see/hear/read/experience any of these too? If so let me know! I’d love to hear about anything you’ve enjoyed, and maybe add some of it to my lists for 2026.

PS Sorry for starting this email with the image of Alan Rickman’s ghost pulling a teatowel out of my arse in Heaven’s toilet, I’ve just been told it’s “a bit strong.”

Film Of The Year (Serious Edition) – The Last Showgirl. This absolutely destroyed me. True, by the time I saw it I was already knee-deep in making a show that was also about a parent who neglects their child in favour of their own delusional creative obsession, so I was primed to be hit hard by this, but still. I think the fact that You Wait. Time Passes. ended up resonating with people as much as it did on an emotional level is partly down to the way I felt coming out of this film, and my determination to make something that treated the subject matter with something at least approaching the same level of seriousness.

Film Of The Year (Fun Edition) – But never mind all that, who goes to the cinema to feel miserable? Well, me occasionally, is the answer to that, but even I can’t deny the joys of watching something that is actively trying to make you have a good time. Making the people watching you have a good time is, in theory, my job after all. In this category, nothing beats Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, a film in which three young close-up magicians team up with four slightly older close-up magicians and then they all use their powers of close-up magic to carry out daring heists against the super-rich which made me kick myself for having slept on the franchise up until this point. It’s so delightfully stupid. At one point a character determinedly sets off to break their friend out of jail, and another stops them by saying “But if you do that, they’ll try to arrest you too!” and the first character goes “Shit!” as though this had genuinely not occurred to him, and the moment seems to be played sincerely. It is full of moments like this.

Film Of The Year (Short Edition) – Over the last couple of years I have accidentally become a minor “cultural gatekeeper” via mine and Miranda’s stewardship of our film night Eggbox (returning to the Pleasance in March!), and in that capacity I now get to see so many amazing short films coming out of the comedy community. It’s hard to pick a favourite from them all because they’re all so brilliant, but there was something very special about Jimmy Slim’s Desert Buffet, a physical/visual comedy feast that he made for his very young son to make him laugh which has such an amazing cartoon-like DIY aesthetic. I don’t think it’s out publicly yet, but keep an eye out for it, it’s wonderful.

Music Of The Year (Live) – Abel Selaocoe at the Queen Elizabeth Hall performing his cello concerto “Four Spirits” with the Aurora Orchestra. I’d never heard of this guy before last Christmas when my mum got me tickets to see him, and he was all over my Spotify Wrapped this year. This concert was easily one of the most punch-in-the-gut beautiful things I saw all year. In the second half the Aurora Orchestra performed Beethoven’s 7th Symphony from memory, and Miranda and I were both very adamant that it was “shit by comparison” and have since taken great delight in dismissing Beethoven as “a poor man’s Abel Selaocoe” every time he comes up in conversation, which is not very often to be fair.

Wow, Joz, I didn’t know you were an amazing photographer too, well done

Music Of The Year (Recorded, New) – This one’s tricky because Abel Selaocoe did actually release the recording of the very concert we saw at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as an album called Four Spirits and it’s easily my favourite new album this year, but it feels like a bit of a cheat to give that one concert two separate entries in this prestigious list, so I’m going to give this to my second-favourite new album of the year, Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE. Bon Iver’s irritating habit of randomly capitalising some words but not others is still present and correct, but at least the songs mostly have names like “Walk Home” and he’s no longer making you refer to songs with titles like “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄” or “715 – CR∑∑KS” or “45_”. At one point he spells the word “Rhythm” as “Rhythmn”, but that’s kind of it for the obnoxious naming of things. Lovely album, anyway.

Music Of The Year (Recorded, Old) – Windswept Adan by Ichiko Aoba. Rateyourmusic, a website that usually rates prog metal and hip-hop disproportionately highly, routinely rates this Japanese contemporary folk-singer among its highest-rated artists of the last few years, so I had to investigate her further. She’s fucking brilliant. It’s hard to know what to say about it without fear of coming across as really ignorant, because I know so little about Japanese music. “Err, yeah, that’s how all Japanese music sounds, you fucking bigot,” you might reasonably reply to my hesitant, stuttering efforts to throw out epithets like “ethereal.” Suffice to say, I am resolved to listen to more Japanese music having really gotten into Ichiko Aoba and Ryuichi Sakamoto in the last year or so. I have added Haruomi Hosono, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Casiopea, Fishmans and Minako Yoshida to my list, what else should I be checking out?

Book Of The Year (Fiction) – Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I gasped so many times during the third act of this. TBA sure knows how to drop an utterly devastating reveal at the exact worst moment. I think she’s an amazing storyteller. This novel kicks off with the kidnapping of the patriarch of a wealthy family, who is eventually returned home. The rest of the book jumps forwards to examine how that kidnapping affected the psyches of everyone in the family, and it’s the most I’ve been sucked into a story all year.

Book Of The Year (Non-Fiction) – What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory by Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse. I was lucky enough to see these two legends in conversation at Hay Festival earlier this year talking about some of the theories in this book, and I think it should become a set text in schools. We are currently witnessing the systematic dismantling of the arts so that it slowly transforms into something that wealthy people get to play at being involved with, and people without disposable income don’t get to have access to, as it was hundreds of years ago before we changed things for the better. Too often, those defending the value of art as a career and a pursuit retreat into rarefied language and woolly magical thinking, and Eno and Adriaanse’s book aims to present a simple, clear theory for why art is valuable and important that a teenager could understand. It’s really brilliant and I even think it could change lives, if it gets people to think about this stuff a bit more sensibly and simply.

Comedy Show Of The Year (Uncanny Valley Edition) – I loved Luke McQueen’s Comedian’s Comedian so much, although we’ve been talking about how funny it is that we both ended up accidentally making the same show, and how it was nice to finally find out how it feels to sit in the audience of one of our own shows. They’re obviously actually very different, but I like to think of them like Ready Steady Cook – someone turned up at both our doors with a bag full of the same ingredients and said “Make a show out of that then” and Luke made a Luke McQueen show out of it and I made a Joz Norris show. It’s so bold and inventive and stupid and grim and I really loved it.

Comedy Show Of The Year (Non-Uncanny Valley Edition) – Claiming that one of my favourite shows of the year is the one that most reminded me of my own work obviously has shades of narcissism to it, so I’m including two shows this year, because I was absolutely in awe of Katie Norris’s Go West Old Maid. Katie is just such a formidable force of nature onstage – such a sharp, funny stand-up and storyteller, but always bold enough to push her shows into something theatrically ambitious. Her songs are brilliant, and the theatrical tribute to her dad that caps off the show is genuinely touching as well as completely ridiculous. A brilliant show, and so deserving of all its accolades.

Comedy Show Of The Year (One-Off Edition) – I have to also include a nod to the one-off Edinburgh performance of Stuart Laws As Michael Caine Saying “Never” For One Hour, which might be the stupidest and most infectiously funny thing I saw this year. This dumb one-joke show really shouldn’t still be funny an hour in, but I could gladly have watched another hour of it. Just when you think it’s exhausted itself, it gets you again.

TV Of The Year – I’ve become so shit at keeping up with TV. I was all-in on live comedy this year, and invested more of my evenings off into watching films than TV. I really enjoyed series 2 of Such Brave Girls, and of course The Celebrity Traitors hoovered me up into its orbit just as it did everyone else. I need to watch The Chair Company and Series 2 of The Rehearsal as a matter of urgency, and then I need to watch all the other great stuff I’ve missed.

Podcast Of The Year – LOL, as if I listen to these.

Coolest Person Of The Year – Sheila Hancock. Met her ever so briefly while recording a radio job, and she was effortlessly one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. I watched her record her scene in awe of her, and she was such a joy to chat to afterwards. Very grateful to have got to work with her.

Place Of The Year – This beach at Lake Como:

That’s all for this year! Let me know what you think – did you see/read/hear any of these? Have you got any good tips from your year that you think I’d enjoy? Let me know!

I hope you all had very merry Christmases, and are all set for a great New Year. May 2026 bring you all you wish for – can’t wait for all the things I’ll discover next year! Take care,

Joz xx

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