Commentary, projects and musings from Rich Hill
Seven days with only local BBC radio, no national stations and no skipping. The week brought pothole phone-ins, farm reports, obituaries, traffic bulletins and a surprising amount of comfort. It was also a clear-eyed look at community, loneliness and what disappears when regional broadcasting shrinks in 2026.
Four Sundays, one muddy field and a thermos: I treated the local car boot sale as a proper field experiment. What I found was haggling as theatre, regulars with alliances, bizarre finds and a set of unwritten rules. In 2026, this gloriously unscripted Sunday ritual deserves to be treated as a British cultural institution.
Cinema hasn't lost its magic; it's lost its casualness. A cheap Saturday morning screening could be the easiest win in town — for families, night-shift workers and anyone who misses seeing a film without checking their bank balance.
A good pub quiz isn't a test — it's a room full of people arguing happily about the name of a dog from a 1990s advert. Here's how I'd run one in 2026 without turning it into a Google race.
For one week I stripped my personal site back to hand-written HTML, a hit counter and a guestbook that actually worked. It was meant to be a bit of nostalgia. It turned into the most useful audit of how I use the internet that I've done in years.
Tickets for under a tenner, a raffle with a meat voucher as the top prize, and a PA that came out of somebody's loft. Village halls and community centres are quietly putting on the most interesting nights out in Britain right now — and I think we should stop treating them like a last resort.
I spent October 2026 watching only free UK streaming apps — BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, My5 and friends. Here's what I found, from buried gems to ad-break revelations, and whether free telly is secretly better than we admit.
Streaming keeps chasing the next big thing, but the British panel show quietly does something better: it lets funny people be funny. Here's why the format deserves a proper 2026 revival — and which moments prove it still works.