First there was France. Then there was Frank Sinatra. Now, there is Franchise. And they’re everywhere! Those dinosaurs didn’t just escape from their pens. Harry Potter spends seven years at Hogwarts. There’s more than one Hunger Game. But even for the world’s most diehard fans of palaeontology, capes, Jennifer Lawrence, 18th Century piracy and Gamorrean guards, is this all getting a bit too much? 

Joined by returning guest Henry Mendoza, the team ask: Is it possible to sustain a franchise, while also shaking things up a little? Is it possible to inject horror and westerns into sci-fi and fantasy worlds? How can audience fatigue be avoided? And is there a moment when world-building can supersede narrative?

Nobel laureate William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Can this explain why you, a 32-year-old, skipped your uncle’s birthday to binge Dawson’s Creek? Why the older you get, the more you see yourself as Citizen Kane? And does the key to an industry competing to define the future lie embedded in the lyrics to Nickelback’s ‘Photograph’? 

Featuring the nostalgic return of special guest Henry Mendoza, the guys explore the rapid reappearance of decades-old characters, the relationship between nostalgia and immortality, whether audiences long for childhood stories or simply how we watched childhood stories, and what it means to feel “at home again.”

BAFTA, commonly mistaken for British After-Fart Trapped Air, has awarded the finest craftspeople in cinema since 1947. But does it still hold sway over the films we watch? Does the accomplishment of Best Film draw you in to click play? And how could the most prestigious of awards evolve in an age of constantly morphing audience tastes? Find out in BAFTA Defence Force.