This is my life again: The Pink Panther at 3am

It's been a couple of years since there was a newborn in the house, so I'd totally forgot how many hours you spend watching TV in the dead of night at minimum volume, watching anything to stay awake while the new human sleeps on your chest, because he bloody well won't sleep anywhere else.

With the first child, we watched all of Breaking Bad together, which I'm certain will not have a detrimental effect on my little girl. Since the second kid came along at the start of June, it's been movies. Lots and lots of movies.

I've averaged two a day/night in the past six weeks and I'll watch bloody anything - On the Waterfront and The King of Staten Island and Dragged Across Concrete and Stories We Tell and Shaun The Sheep and California Split and John Carpenter's Starman.

Some of them have been very good - Spontaneous was much funnier than it sounds and raised massively disturbing existential questions, while also being the tensest goddamn thing. And I only watched The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea because a copy of the book has been sitting on a colleague's desk for months, and I was 100% not prepared for where that film went.

But then I'll spend hours watching silly old comedies like the first Pink Panther film, and the exquisitely mean Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Penny Points to Paradise, the first proper film the Goons ever did. And I'd never seen Bowfinger before, which was a pity, because Eddie Murphy's performances in that thing are eternally funny.

I also dig European movies about miserable people, because you really have to pay attention - I have to put in a lot of brainpower to follow things like The Whistlers; Leviathan; A White White Day; and Cold War, and that keeps us all conscious.

And some are them are just great mindless shit, like that Zohan film Adam Sandler did, or The Last Dragon, which I hadn't seen since I was 12, even though I have been walking around saying 'Hey my man, what it look like?' with disturbing regularity.

Whatever gets you through the night. Whatever works. I just gotta stop accidentally watching so many fucking Mel Gibson films. That never works out for anybody, and the new guy might not care, but he probably doesn't need those Gibson vibes.