We’re living in an age of endless media options. When you feel like watching a movie, for example, you can fire up Netflix and watch the latest hot new release, which is nice, because then when your co-workers are all talking about it over lunch the next week, you’ll understand what’s going on. But if you’re not in the mood for that, you could choose to poke around the dusty back shelves of Netflix, so to speak, or access different streaming services for free via your local library system, or even poke around the literal dusty back shelves of your local thrift shop for DVDs, if you have anything to play them on.

The fun thing about this is: you get to see movies no-one else you know has seen. The problem with this is: no one else you know has seen them, so who are you going to talk about them with? Same goes for music, books, art, etc. When you venture off the beaten path, sometimes you stumble on a gem, or something maddeningly ambiguous, and it’s frustrating to have no one to dissect it with!

And so we’d like to welcome you to Selected Works. For each episode of Selected Works, someone here at Megaphonic will select a work that they’re passionate about, but that they think hasn’t received as much discussion as it deserves to have — or maybe something that deserves to have a critical reappraisal. And we’ll assemble a small panel to read the book or watch the movie or whatever, and then talk about it.

And of course, we hope you’ll check out the works as well, and be part of the conversation. In fact, you can get started right now! Our first three episodes will be about:

• I’m Your Man [Ich bin dein Mensch], a German sci-fi film from 2021 that asks: What if a chatbot was hot and you could date it? Could you fall in love with it, if it was trained specifically on you?

• Titus Groan, the first novel in Mervyn Peake's Gormanghast books, which is that other big mid-century fantasy book.

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a movie with a reputation for being agonizingly slow, but which might be worth rediscovering.

If this sounds interesting to you, then go ahead and check out those works — and please subscribe to Selected Works in your favourite podcast app.