The weekly round up of entertainment shanigans. January 9th 2026.

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Well, what a week it’s been in the glitter‑encrusted funhouse of UK entertainment, where nostalgia, capitalism, and sheer cultural chaos have collided like contestants on Total Wipeout. If you thought January would be quiet, think again — the nation has been whipped into a frenzy by the return of two titans of British television: Gladiators and Love Island, the cultural equivalent of feeding the public a diet of Haribo and Red Bull and then acting surprised when everyone starts vibrating.

Yes, Gladiators is back, complete with Lycra, foam weaponry, and contestants who look like they’ve been grown in a lab using protein powder and Essex DNA. The BBC insists it’s a “modern reboot,” which is code for “exactly the same but with more health and safety forms.” Meanwhile, Love Island will be returning to remind us that romance is dead, vocabulary is optional, and the human body can apparently survive on nothing but lip filler and watermelon-flavoured vape clouds. Viewers will be arguing over who’s “real,” who’s “fake,” and who’s “only here for the Boohoo deal,” which is to say: everything is exactly as it should be.

In more refined news — or at least news involving fewer abs — Kylie Minogue has officially landed her own Netflix documentary series, proving once again that she is the closest thing Australia has to a religion. The series promises “unprecedented access,” which in documentary terms means “we found some old VHS tapes and Kylie agreed to talk over them.” Expect emotional revelations, glitter explosions, and at least one slow‑motion montage of her walking through a corridor while fans scream in the background.

Meanwhile, Take That tickets went on sale, causing nationwide hysteria as middle‑aged Britain attempted to relive its youth by fighting online queues that moved more slowly than a pensioner reversing a caravan. Fans reported waiting “up to six hours,” which is impressive dedication for a band whose average lyric contains fewer words than a Gregg’s receipt. Still, nostalgia is a powerful drug, and if anyone can unite the nation in a frenzy of polite middle‑class panic, it’s Gary Barlow.

But the real headline of the week came from the accountants — yes, the people who normally only appear in news stories when someone’s been arrested. New data revealed that the UK entertainment industry grew by a record 7.1% in 2025, which is astonishing given that most of us spent the year complaining that everything was terrible. Apparently, while we were moaning about the state of television, we were also quietly shovelling money into it like coal into a Victorian furnace.

And the spending didn’t stop there. Music sales hit an all‑time high of £2.45 billion, proving that despite the rise of streaming, Brits still love buying things they can hold, sniff, alphabetise, and pretend they’ll “listen to properly one day.” Vinyl revenues alone jumped by 18.5%, which is remarkable considering half the people buying vinyl don’t own a record player and the other half insist it “sounds warmer” while listening through speakers they bought from Aldi.

And who sits atop this mountain of musical cash? Taylor Swift, of course, whose album The Life Of A Showgirl became the biggest‑selling record of the year. Swift now controls so much of the global economy that economists are considering replacing the FTSE 100 with a chart of her moods. Fans queued, streamed, bought vinyl, bought CDs, bought the deluxe edition, bought the deluxe deluxe edition, and in at least one case, bought a second copy “just in case the first one gets lonely.”

So there you have it: a week where Gladiators returned to hit people with padded sticks, Love Island returned to hit people with emotional damage, Kylie Minogue got her own Netflix shrine, Take That caused a national ticketing meltdown, the entertainment industry made more money than ever, vinyl rose from the dead like a hipster zombie, and Taylor Swift continued her reign as Supreme Empress of All Commerce.

Tune in next week, when presumably someone else from the ’90s will announce a comeback, Netflix will greenlight another documentary about someone who isn’t dead yet, and Britain will continue spending money it definitely doesn’t have on entertainment it definitely doesn’t need.


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