The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

A little while I was gifted a copy of the book 1000 Movies You Must See Before You Die . I occasionally used it to look things up but last autumn I had a crazy thought- what if I attempted to watch all thousand films, in chronological order of when they were released. It's a mammoth undertaking and last week I finally left the 1920s and moved into the strange new world of the 1930s.  Watching my way through 1920s cinema history has been fascinating. Fortunately the majority of films of this era are freely available on YouTube and most of the rest haven't been too difficult to get hold of either. The first sound film or 'talkie' wasn't released until 1927 and really until the turn of the decade most films were silent. Watching a silent film feels like a very different experience. It requires a level of concentration that we're not used as modern film and TV viewers. There's no way you can follow a silent film whilst scrolling on your phone- you have to watch ...

Let me take you back to the early 2010s. One evening my social group ended up going to Winchester's one and only nightclub, a rare occurrence when we were neither at the student union or one of the many local pubs. I don't think we ever returned to this club because the experience was awful. Drunken men, many more than twice the age of us, were constantly touching up and generally giving unwanted sexual attention. I remember being full of anger and doing everything I could to fend them off.  Bar a few other occasions, that's pretty much the limit of my experience in this area. One of the many privileges of being male is that on the whole you don't have to worry about being sexually harassed. My experiences may be limited but I have no doubt that pretty much all the women I know have been sexually harassed repeatedly during their lives- a recent survey found that 97% of young women in the UK have been sexually harassed.  This week allegations surfaced about the actor, wr...