Below the Blanket ★★★★  

Enough ★★★★   

Immaculately turned out in winning smiles, navy and nylon, cabin crew Jane and Toni dispense comforting reassurance and flirty glances to passengers at 30,000 feet. Down on the ground, though, they’re juggling kids, kitchen colour-schemes and semi-rapist boyfriends. And what’s that age-old rumble coming from deep in the ground?

Ciaran Dowd ***

The highlight of 2018 for me was the return of two mighty sets of talents – Flight of the Conchords and The League of Gentlemen – and it was heartwarming to see that they had lost none of their sharpness, wit or love of performing in front of a live audience. In stand-up, while a lot of established comics were again producing the goods, one newcomer, a young Irishwoman, stood out.

Home ★★★★   

The Edinburgh International Festival scored quite a coup in securing the services of Bernstein protégée Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on the very day of the great composer/conductor’s centenary – and for the festival’s penultimate concert of 2018.

There were two immediate casualties at Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s high-energy account of Messiaen’s monumental Des canyons aux étoiles… with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival.

La maladie de la mort ★★★  

Toxic masculinity in all its appalling variety is a hot topic across Edinburgh’s festivals this year – just check out Daughter at CanadaHub and even Ulster American at the Traverse for two particularly fine and shocking examinations.

Orpheus ★★★★  

Rosie Jones ★★★★

There are two versions of Rosie Jones, she tells us; one nice, one not so nice. And who knows which of those would have won the battle of psyches if the comic had not been deprived of oxygen for a quarter of an hour during birth, she asks in Fifteen Minutes. It's a terrific device – subtle but pointed, witty but poignant – as she muses about what kind of person she might have been without cerebral palsy.