Max Rushden is a very honest man.
When we spoke to the TV and radio presenter, expecting to have to tease out some dark cultural secrets with some canny questions, he promptly admitted that, "there's very little in my viewing and listening joy that isn't guilty - it's all guilty if I'm brutally honest about it. They tried to make me cool for six months on Soccer AM and then they just gave up."
Well, they needn't have worried, because Max's choices contain some selections that no-one can argue with: the brilliance of Neighbours and the sweet joys of the tomato. Read on to see them all, and enjoy some hilarious stories.
Soccer AM is every Sat, 10am, Sky Sports 1. Max Rushden hosts The Warm Up on talkSPORT every Sunday from 11am
(Images: Rex)
FILM
"The greatest film of all time is Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I'm not sure if I should feel any guilt about that - I subconsciously feel like that is something I should feel guilty about, but when Robin of Loxley finds out that Christian Slater is his brother, that is a beautiful moment. And when Morgan Freeman says, "I am not one of you, but I fight like one of you", that turns things around at frankly quite a worrying point in the battle. You can kind of get away with saying it's brilliant because you love Alan Rickman, but the reason I love it is not because of Alan Rickman - even though he is brilliant in it - I just love it."
"I must have seen Cool Runnings so many times - I start crying before their final run. I don't ever cry at things that I should cry at - serious emotional things, like my girlfriend going home to Australia for a month to see her family...I was quite stoic and strong at the airport - but when I know that that sled is not going to get them all the way down, I've gone."
MUSIC
"I'm best man for a good mate of mine at a wedding in a couple of weeks, and at the stag do, one of the games was for everybody to send us their favourite song, and when we're just sitting around, in kind of a chill out time, he'll listen to every song, and judge us all. I slightly jokingly picked R.Kelly's The World's Greatest, but having said that, I listened to it on Spotify about 100 times and I actually really quite like the song. He actually stripped me of my best man's status because of the quality of the song."
"The really bad thing about Spotify is that other people see what you're listening to - I had no idea about this, I don't understand technology at all - and so occasionally someone will say "Max, you listened to Proud by Heather Small 15 times in the last day and I'd be like "ah, yeah, I have". I like anything that you can put on an Olympic sports montage that I will definitely well up at - I'm a huge fan. Proud - Heather Small, Something Inside So Strong - I love it."
TV
"This is partly - and I'm not trying to justify it because I do like it - because of my strange - ie. really nice - working hours, I'm in my house quite often during student time, so I think I'm the only person who has watched Neighbours consistently from the late 80s/early 90s to today."
"I love Neighbours - I love it because: a) it's very sunny there most of the time and, b) it's very black and white; you know who's good and who's bad. Specifically, anyone with a beard - except for Toadfish - is bad. Anyone turns up on screen and they have facial hair, they're a bad character. And the whole thing is based on these really irritating misunderstandings, which you could just say "look, why don't you just say what's happened?" - obviously they'd then have no more material."
"The other part of this is when I got Soccer AM, they said, "right give us three people you really want to have on Soccer AM and we'll try and get them". I said David Attenborough - no guilt there, the man's a hero - Angela Lansbury, because Murder She Wrote is amazing (no-one knew if Angela Lansbury is still alive or not - I still don't - so they didn't try and book her) and I said, "get me Karl Kennedy". So, we got Karl Kennedy on and it's the first time anybody's ever walked in to the Soccer AM studio - we've had some big names, Noel Gallagher, Mr T - cult and cool people - but when he walked in, during an ad break, everyone spontaneously cheered."
"Karl Kennedy is one of the few people I've been starstruck by; the great thing is he's sort of become a mate - to the point where he will sing at my wedding. How cool would it be to say "oh, singing? we haven't got like a random covers band - it's Karl Kennedy". I mean that's amazing, I've got no guilt about that - he's a hero."
BOOK
"I try and read...I think any book is a victory, but I try and read quite well. I try and read one proper book - that's won a prize, or is a seminal piece of literature - and then I'll read one Jack Reacher book. He's a vigilante, and every man wants to be him, and every woman wants to be with him, and he just wears the clothes on his back, and when they get torn in some massive fight with 20 people that he easily wins, he then just goes into another store and buys some nondescript, unbranded chinos and a lumberjack shirt, and just carries on his way and always ends up in scrapes, and is always doing the right thing, not necessarily with the right attitude."
"I don't feel guilty about reading Jack Reacher books, and I don't think ShortList readers would feel guilty about it, but I have some intellectual friends who make me feel slightly less of an intellectual by doing that."
"I also try and read books that are made into films, just so at the end of the film you can loudly say, "it's not as good as the book is it?"."
MAGAZINE/COLUMN
"To me it's all about the font size - if the font size is small I really struggle. I can't read The Economist for that reason - I mean obviously I can't read it because I wouldn't understand what was in it - but my main problem is that. I mean the Financial Times - it might be some great journalism, but the font is tiny."
"The first thing I read on a Sunday is Mariella Frostrup's problem page in the Observer magazine - before I turn to the football. Just to find out what the problem is and Mariella saying "just suck it up - just deal with it, we've all got problems". She once retweeted me and I got a bit excited."
FOOD
"I had the kebab years and if you see photos of me post-University, I look so terrible. I wouldn't say I was double the size, but...I wore the same blue jumper for a decade, I am spotty and fat. I went out with this girl for about three years around then and she had the bad years of me. The really terrible years - I don't know how she managed to survive that long."
"I was just like "chips, cheese and donor meat with burger sauce" - I could eat that sober. Now I look back and think, "I don't know how I managed that". I think I eat pretty well now - obviously as soon as someone's said "curry" I can't think of anything else, but I just try and avoid people who say curry on a regular basis."
"I'm also a huge tomato fan, I think they're hugely underrated - people eat them and take them for granted, they don't actually take time to think about how good a tomato really is. That's not guilty - I just fight for them. I think people overrate ice cream and underrate tomatoes."
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