Highlights of 2022: Jacqui Hurley, Stefanie Preissner, Kevin Barry, etc, make their selections
L-R: Gearóid Farrelly; Stefanie Preissner; Jacqui Hurley
I’m a politics nerd so Pandemonium by Hugh O’Connell and Jack Horgan-Jones felt like a literary version of Love Island. I loved the behind-the-scenes feel and the juicy exclusives they managed to get from people who are typically tight-lipped.
Lego Masters Australia ticks all my boxes. It’s like The Great British Bake Off but with Lego. It really puts my casual Lego building to shame. The tension of watching a shaky hand put the last brick on a Lego tower is surprisingly thrilling.
I have a new-born so I have Lullaby Baby by Nursery Rhymes 123 on repeat.
Owen Roe blew my mind with his performance in The Steward of Christendom. I saw it on opening night with Michael D Higgins in attendance so the line “if men weren’t capable of redemption, how would Ireland ever have a president?” got a huge laugh.
In October, PJ Gallagher spoke about his experience of mental illness and ending up in psychiatric hospital earlier this year with Jim McCabe on Radio Nova. PJ is a dear friend. Hearing his story – and the impact it’s had on so many people who listened who also struggle with mental illness and ill health – made it a standout moment for me.
My go-to novelist is Marian Keyes. The moment Again, Rachel came out I bought it. Her punchlines and the way she delivers stories never changes. Laugh-out-loud humour. She’s the quintessence of Irish people. Best book of the year for me by a mile.
I consumed Bad Sisters in about a day. Two really funny women – Sharon Horgan and Aisling Bea are just dynamite. It’s got that dark Irish humour. I devoured it.
Top Gun: Maverick was the only film I wanted to see this year. My sister is a pilot. When we were kids she used make me watch it. So when this came out I went to it. It was class. Same storylines but nearly better than the original.
Counting Crows at the 3Arena. I’ve seen them six or seven times. Everyone at the gig was the same vintage – middle-aged. It was chilled. There was no drama. Everyone was civilised, enjoyed the music and went home. They played all the hits. One of the most memorable gigs I was at.
Adele is the most amazing musician. I’m in awe of her. She’s back in Las Vegas after a couple of years’ absence. I watched one of her concerts recently. She’s an artist that would stop you in your tracks.
- Jacqui Hurley’s Girls Play Too: Book 2 is published by Merrion Press
Aingeala Flannery’s The Amusements is set in Tullamore. It’s a collection of short stories that link together. It’s so good.
I loved Dead To Me. Christina Applegate plays a woman whose husband is killed. Another actor plays the woman who was involved in his death. They become best friends. It’s brilliant.
My music moment for 2022 was Naimee Coleman releasing music again. I was a massive fan of her stuff in the 90s. She just released a new single Lost Our Way featuring Paul Noonan. I’ve had that on repeat for about a week.
In July I went to see Belinda Carlisle at Vicar St. I’m a big 80s-90s nut. It was her first gig back after the pandemic. It was amazing. All the hits. She has great presence.
I went to see ABBA Voyage – the hologram show – in London. I got one ticket, went on my own, which is not the way to do it. It was weird. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I’m glad I went. It was interesting, but go on the dancefloor. Don’t sit on your own.
- Gearoid Farrelly’s Glamour Hammer tour visits Cork’s Everyman Theatre (8 January) and Sea Church, Ballycotton (26 May).
Season 4 of Ozark was very good. It gets better and better. I work in comedy and entertainment so to switch off I want to watch dark material – the complete opposite of those worlds! Give me criminal minds and murder! Ozark is perfect.
Top Gun: Maverick. For the plot obviously. It’s a great action movie. From start to finish, it’s all go. Edge of your seat. Loved it.
The Frank and Walters at Electric Picnic. It was on at night. We came across the gig half-accidentally, wandering the woods. It was the best gig I’ve ever been to. It was so, so good.
My favourite song this year is Rihanna’s Lift Me Up. It’s not my favourite song of hers, but she hasn’t released music in years. So many of her songs were a huge part of my childhood. It’s exciting that she’s back on the scene.
Richard Grogan, the Tik Tok Solicitor, challenged the perception of what we thought lawyers were like – money-hungry fellas in suits who didn’t give a damn. He was so knowledgeable and he shared his knowledge for free, helping young people working minimum-pay jobs who were getting mistreated, for example. He passed away last month which was shocking. It’s sad – he was iconic.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Bill Furlong is so beautifully, sensitively observed. And if Cillian Murphy should have a fall or something, I reckon I should play Furlong in the movie version.
Film: All Quiet on the Western Front – the best cinematic depiction of the horrors of war I’ve ever seen.
Gig: Robert Plant’s celestial voice and the generosity with which he elevates his band, not himself, made for a moving, almost religious experience at his Saving Grace gig at the Everyman Theatre as part of the Cork Jazz Festival.
Theatre: An Octoroon – Abbey Theatre. Seeing Patrick Martins, a Nigerian-Irish actor, giving a tour de force performance on our national stage was exhilarating.
Other: John B. Keane’s Letters of a Country Postman was the Everyman’s summer show. I thought the fella playing the lead was a dish and seemed really sound as well. He's one to watch. [Ed - the actor was named Tadhg Hickey]
The Colony by Audrey Magee is set on an island off the coast of Ireland in the 1970s. A British artist comes to paint the cliffs. A French expert in language comes to try and save the Irish language spoken on the island. It’s gorgeous.
Severance is a series on Apple TV+. It’s speculative fiction. There are four main characters. John Turturro is in it. It’s smart. It’s clever. It plays out really well. It was the show I absolutely had to see every week.
An album which came out at the tail of 2021 which I only discovered this year: Arab Strap’s As Days Get Dark. I’ve listened to it again and again. There isn’t a dud track on it.
I went to London early in the year to see Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem with Mark Rylance. It was a revival. I came out of it feeling fairly beaten up in the best way. It’s extraordinary.
I went to the Biennale in Venice this year. There’s a huge tract this year done by women and from countries that might not have gotten a decent shake before. Two days of wandering around the best of modern art. It was brilliant.
Bill Whelan’s memoir The Road to Riverdance is a remarkable read. It’s beautifully written. I was pulled right in by the humour. It’s the story of Ireland from the 1950s to the 1990s.
The TV series that stood out – I only got to see it this year – was The Queen’s Gambit. I loved the look of it, the colourful palette that evoked the times in a stylised but realistic way.
The Man Who Sees Through Shadows, a retrospective by Mike Bunn – who turned 80 this year – at Farmleigh Gallery. There’s something about the texture and the light of his photographs that are beautiful.
When Anaïs Mitchell released the first glimpse into her first solo album in eight years – her song Bright Star – it spoke to me like no other song at that point. Lyrically and vocally, it’s superb. When my little eight-year-old girl heard it in the car in the morning, she asked for it again about 10 days in a row.
Bob Dylan at the 3Arena. I’ve been a lifelong fan since seeing him in Paris aged 13 around 1978. The Hot House Flowers went together as a band to this gig. Sixth row. It was spellbinding, seeing an 81-year-old Bob Dylan at work. You could see the glint in his eye.
King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Calendar is about coping with loss and identity and sexuality. It’s like a fairy tale. You could read it any level, with layers of meaning that perhaps younger readers wouldn’t get. It’s interesting and informing.
The Crown – even though I’m not a monarchist, but maybe the inner extrovert likes a bit of pomp and ceremony and pageantry – is excellent. The historical backdrop is fascinating. Imelda Staunton has the cool, steel resolve that the queen had at that age.
The Banshees of Inisherin is beautiful to look at. It’s avant-garde and an interesting exploration of masculinity and male friendship. It’s also darkly comic and very moving. Colin Farrell – in a role I haven’t seen him in before – and Brendan Gleeson are brilliant.
Eraser by Katie Kim is an incredible song. It’s from her new album. It’s captivating and haunting. I love everything she does. It has this amazing drum track that doesn’t change and her voice is so plaintive.
I got to sing Harvest Moon with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra for Culture Night on TV. I put my clarinet to a middle section which he does with his harmonica. It was a miracle it worked – I hadn’t played it in so long. I got to wear a suit, which was class. I felt like a boss.
Seven Steeples by Sara Baume is maybe her best book to date, and one of the best ever West Cork books! It's a beautiful novel that will live with you – she's incapable of a single false note in her work.
The second season of The White Lotus is scurrilous and appalling and more evidence that we are among the Endtimes and is far and away the most fun to be had on the small screen this year.
I've been listening to Brian Eno's records since I was a small boy out in the fields and his new one, ForeverAndEverNoMore, is beautiful and somehow deeply gloomy and open-hearted and optimistic all at once.
Joachim Trier's The Worst Person In The World is brilliant and inventive and very funny and moving. It's on MUBI, which is great value and the movie streamer you need for the good stuff.
Listening to Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari at about six o'clock one glorious July morning out in the garden during an insomniac spell – the birds were skanking in the willow trees.
I can’t shut up about how incredibly good Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka is. A crime fiction masterpiece.
A pair of dramas on the theme of tech-adjacent deluded egomaniacs: The Dropout and WeCrashed.
I’ve seen shamefully few new films this year but Thirteen Lives AKA Ron Howard does the Thai cave rescue on Amazon was riveting – but not for claustrophobics.
Midnights by Taylor Swift. I didn’t think I’d still have her on repeat at aged 40 but here we are.
Alison Spittle’s Off Menu, the comedy/food podcast hosted by James Acaster and Ed Gamble, had me in hysterics. Just wait for “not her, not now”… Iconic!
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is magical. One for the ages. She’s only published two short story books and two very short novels and yet she’s a giant. I love that she has a 400-page book and then gets rid of everything that she doesn’t need. There’s a great husbandry in that.
Bob Dylan at the 3Arena. It was like a Beckett play – he was this disembodied voice behind his piano. All you could see was this head and him growling into two microphones, doing a magical job. It was so absorbing, so special.
My son Toby has a band called Babylamb. He has a track called Mister Magic which I love. I play it all the time in the car. Graham Norton describes their music as “a great bop”. I don’t know what that is.
All the actors in Tom Murphy’s Whistle in the Dark were brilliant, but in particular Brian Gleeson. The way he constructed his performance left me, as a working playwright, with immediate fantasies: “I want to write something for an actor like that.”
I have a great friend Sasha Sykes who is a furniture designer and artist. She works with resin. She encases these birds’ nests in these cubes. They’re wonderful. A bird’s nest is so temporary but on an engineering level so interesting and complex and she’s making them permanent. I went to her new studio to see her works in progress.
The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer. Roger doesn’t actually get much of a look in here as Geoff ranges far and wide on various types of endings.
The miniseries Station Eleven is a loose adaptation of Emily St John Mandel’s book by the same name, but shared its faith in the power of art and featured some transcendent moments.
Sam Amidon at Connolly’s of Leap. The perfect, intimate room to hear this beautiful performance.
Sweatson Klank’s album Postcards. Gorgeous, ocean-deep ambience that soothes the soul and stretches the mind.
A tour of Eugene’s gloriously ornate bar in Ennistymon, Co Clare (by Eugene), followed, the next evening, by a wonderful singing session in O’Loclainn’s in Ballyvaughan.
