Wednesday, 31 December 2025

My Predictions for 2026 (and how badly I did last time)


Every year I, and many others, try and predict the future. I’m always way more wrong than I am right. How badly did I do last year? Let us see (then we’ll have another stab at feeble futurology, so keep reading) 

Kev F's Confident Predictions for 2025

Strictly won by Rosie Jones - WRONG

Cancelled: next big inappropriate-behaviour star to get cancelled is female, from ITV daytime - WRONG. We had Gregg Wallace, a couple of Strictly dancers and no one else big springs to mind. 

Musk dropped by Trump before the summer, is the easy prediction. The bolder prediction would be WHEN Musk gets dumped. I say April 28th. - VERY CLOSE. It was May 29th

Neil Gaiman makes triumphant return and nothing more is said on the matter. - WRONG. He sued someone for breaking their NDA (stay classy Neil) then kept quiet 

No Doctor Who Christmas episode, and show's future in limbo into 2026 - SADLY CORRECT

Youtube Drama - Someone makes a well written drama that, despite its low production values, becomes bigger than anything on the streamers or broadcast TV. - NOT SURE. I’m told Ai microdramas are a new sensation in China. And Italian Brainrot, does that count?

BBC goes subscription. The Corporation moves to an NPR model - NOT YET. But they have just been sued for $10billion by Trump, so next year’s funding model could be penny for the guy. 
 
Bad Enoch saves the Tories. Despite Reform winning a byelection, Kemi Badenoch succeeds in uniting her party and by the end of the year she's more popular than Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage. - NOPE Reform did well in local council elections, Tories did worst, Labour middling.  

Syria: Freedom Fighter who's not a terrorist turns out was a terrorist all along. Newspapers stop bigging him up. - FAR FROM IT. In November he was guest of honour at the Whitehouse. 

Ukraine: war ends, nobody's happy with the solution. NOT YET

Israel manages a ceasefire in more than half the countries it's firing at. PARTLY, SORT OF, BUT NOT MUCH

Electric cars work out a way of actually being feasible. NOT REALLY. Tesla sales plummeted when Musk went full Nazi, which didn’t help. 

New TV: PG Wodehouse Universe, 
Young James Bond; 
first successful British studio audience sitcom in years is made for Youtube and is big hit; 
Netflix buys one of US TV's biggest broadcasters 
 - I GOT ONE RIGHT! 
Netflix bought (or have started to buy) Warner Brothers Discovery. And young James Bond is not out of the question after Amazon bought MGM in early 2025

Weather: White Christmas, hot dry summer, no major flooding. ONE OUT OF THREE

Grand National won by horse named after a meme (eg Deez Nuts, or My Name Is Jeff). NOPE. Unless Nick Rockett is a meme I’ve not encountered. 



So that was last year’s failure rate.  Here are this years predictions 

Kev F's Confident Predictions for 2026

New category, contestants in Celebrity Traitors:

Victoria Coren Mitchell
Richard Osman
Rosie Jones (Traitor)
Tess Daly
Jimmy Carr
Sarah Lancashire
Chris Packham
Professor Hannah Fry
Graham Norton
Miranda Hart
Chris Hoy
John Richardson
Gabby Logan
Sophie Ellis Bextor
Eddie Kadi
Tamsin Grieg
Tim Vine
Gbemisola Ikumelo
Bob Mortimer
Lucy Worsley

UK Politics: 
- Labour leader will still be Starmer
- Badenoch will be replaced, probs by Jenrick
- Reform will lose more MPs and councillors than they gain
- Greens will win lots of polls but no seats of value
- Your Party will collapse and disband

US Politics:
- Trump will still be in power
- War with Venezuela becomes real and deadly. Other South American countries join in
- Midterms will be disrupted by military action and won’t happen as they should
- Trump will drop libel case against BBC
- Epstein Files will amount to nothing and be forgotten 

Media:
- New comic shop chain launches, centred around The Dogman Shelf and young readers
- No new Doctor Who apart from one off Christmas special, starring Billie Piper as The Doctor 
- New Doctor Who showrunner named. It will be Charlie Brooker.
- iPlayer amalgamates with ITVX , Britbox and Channel 4 to create new popular streamer
- First Ai feature film to get big ratings and critical success. It’s by Disney. 

Ai (LLM slop art) will also appear on packaging in supermarkets by big company, eg Kellogs, and TV advert. In fact my big prediction is that we, the artists, lose our battle against Ai slop big time, and it is embraced widely and ubiquitously. "Real art" becomes an elitist quality-based thing that "normals" don't understand the point of.

New Strictly presenters: Zoe Ball and La Voix

Cancelled: One of those big Youtubers that the kids are all over. But then they go MAGA.

Revived or remade TV shows: The Prisoner, 1984, Tales Of The Unexpected, The Good Life, Doctor In The House, Mary Mungo & Midge, Seaside Special





oh dear I seem to have run out of ideas. Any suggestions?

My Books And Where To Find Them...










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Tuesday, 30 December 2025

My Comic Strip Review Of The Year 2025

Here it is, my comic strip review of the year. I started this tradition back in 2010 (see below) and I've managed to keep it going ever since. And, as you might see I've mentioned, I've also kept up a hand-written diary all year. It's the first time I've done that since 1995! So, did much happen this year? Let's break it down...


Romeo and Juliet was on my to-do list from the start of the year. I resumed writing it in March, was ready to draw it in May, drew it through the summer,  and was able to write "all drawn!" on September 30th. At which point I launched the Kickstarter, thinking the colouring bit would be perfunctory and I'd have it published well in time for Thought Bubble in November. 180 pages turn out to take a long time to colour, its arrival coming at the start of December meaning I won't get to foist it on the world until the new year.


Richard The Third was, in fact, one of the things that had held up Romeo and Juliet, because I really felt I had to produce a colour edition. I completed that in March and went on to sell 250 copies through the year. Kids in schools continued to be offered the cheaper black and white version. I have a couple of schools in particular to thank for a lot of those sales: one in Edinburgh took over 50 copies, and one in Bristol took 80. Schools took about a dozen on average, some took more, some took none. But those accounted for the bulk of my sales, along with appearance at cons and a few, a very few, online sales. New year resolution: sell more books online somehow.


The books I created back in 2020, my debut graphic novels, continue to sell pretty well. It's all relative, I know, and me selling about 150 each of my books is piddling compared to many of my contemporaries (this is, after all, the year when Jamie Smart's Bunny vs Monkey passed the 2 million sales mark). But I realise it's actually better than a lot of self-publishers do, so I don't care if feeling proud of my meagre achievements makes me look a little pathetic. Five years ago I had no books to show for myself, and now I have a raft of them that kids actually buy and actually enjoy. I know, cos they tell me. I have repeat customers, would you believe. I'd love to be playing with the big kids, and I do still have an actual genuine agent (I am with United Agents, though I struggle to believe it myself), and it was with their blessing that I self published Romeo and Juliet rather than waiting for a publisher to bite. But I want to approach those publishers again cos, dammit, some of my stuff is actually pretty good! 


It was the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre's quietest year ever, since their creation about twenty years ago. Once more it seems Edinburgh will remain unaffordable, and though I'd love to, I'm worried my mojo might have gone. They did increasingly big sellout Edinburgh runs and tours from 2007-10, then steady runs and bigger tours from 2012-19, a brilliant burst of lockdown shows in 2020 and 2021, which led to their most recent Edinburgh run in 2022 and tour in 2023. But since 2024's Post Office Scandal The Musical, I've not written or recorded a single new thing for them. The books have taken over my creative space (even though, as I ought to keep reminding myself, I can make more from one sellout Socks' show that from a month's worth of book sales*)

*The devil's in the detail there, but let's just say the Socks show at Chorley Little Theatre in April paid me more than I took in book sales in December. 


As I've already detailed, I sold what feels like a lot of books. As I pick over the bones of it now, I'm talking myself out of feeling so triumphant, realising self-publishing books might not be as profitable as other things I do. But I am so proud of my books, and so pleased that kids like them and (via their parents) buy them, that I'm going to continue feeling chuffed. Poor but chuffed. These books, if we were able to scale up their sales, really feel like the best thing I've ever done. (Though I currently have Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet voices in my ear reminding me how much I can earn per hour doing them instead!) 


It gets dark around this bit of the page, doesn't it? I saw only my second dead body this year. The first was Mum back in 2018, the second was next door neighbour Kyle, who I helped his landlord with, when she found him. We called the police and went through all the rigmarole. Not the biggest event of the year, but one that's stayed with me. I've also drawn the car breaking down on Christmas Eve, which really does suggest I had an uneventful year. Maybe I did. Hev did a lot of reading and researching which should, I hope, be turning into writing soon. She's also lined up something for next year's Fringe Arts Bath, which should be a welcome return to her artwork. In the first draft of this page I showed her in hospital earlier this month, but she didn't think that was a good representation of her year, and I must say I agree.


And in conclusion there's me and King Lear, who's one of the partly-started books I did 20-odd pages of in 2024 (in order to impress publishers who were duly nonplussed). The others were Romeo and Juliet, obviously completed this year, Twelfth Thing, and a new version of Midsummer Night's Dream. Will one of those get finished in 2026? Your guess is as good as mine.

Here's to a 2026 as unpredictable as all its predecessors. On which subject, if you wondered how I've captured the last fifteen years in cartoon, here's your answer...

My previous years' Comic Strip Reviews:


2018 - Losing the studio, and Mum
2015 - Comics, classes, Detectives, glasses

2013 - Bananaman & Socks In Space

2012 - Adelaide

2011 - 4 weddings and a 50th

2010 - Socks, and Dad's funeral



My Books And Where To Find Them...










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