Tom Rosenthal's Guilty Pleasures

The Plebs and Friday Night Dinner star on the things he likes that he really shouldn't...

Guilty Pleasure: Film

Keanu Reeves: Popular culture tells me he is bad at acting, which upsets me as he is in every film I like. I don’t like that many films (four), as I haven’t really seen that many (eleven?); I find them too long and the music too silly. But of the ones I do like (The Matrix, The Devil’s Advocate, A Scanner Darkly and Blade Runner) 75% of them contain Keanu Reeves. And cool people on internet forums and in Hoxton tell me I should feel guilty about that, which I do.

Guilty Pleasure: TV Show

Made In Chelsea: I feel guilty watching it because I have a sense that something in both me and the world is dying and I can’t put my finger upon it. It’s beautifully shot and delightfully put together, which tricks the mind into thinking it’s actually television. Because it all looks nice, right? Champagne and strawberries and waste? The other reason I’m watching it is because I have a very posh friend and am trying to learn to communicate with her in her own language.

Guilty Pleasure: Album

This was a close call between Britney Spears’ Blackout and Britney Spears' Circus. I mean, I obviously feel guilty about owning both, as it's music ostensibly designed to precondition teenagers to life sluttery under the subtle pretence of dancing around their bedrooms but, like most of the most terrible things in the world, it's frighteningly well produced. For me, Blackout has the better tracks including Radar (about being slutty), Piece of Me (about being slutty) and Get Naked (parentheses unnecessary), so is more of a pleasure, but Circus probably makes me feel more guilty, mainly for the track If U Seek Amy. The innocent amongst you will not have read that for the horror that it is, but please, read it again, and say it to yourself, slowly. Yup. Yup.

Guilty Pleasure: Song

Another tragic tale from Walt Disney’s questionable production house - Christina Aguilera’s Ain’t No Other Man. A pleasure because of its upbeat jazzy tempo and delightful harmonies, but a guilty one because a) I spent too much alone time watching the video and b) I spent too much alone time pretending that Christina was singing this song to me. I agree with her, I don’t think there is another man for her. I can only hope she finds a way to get in touch.

Guilty Pleasure: Food

Starbucks Toffee Waffles: These little bastards look up at you every time you go for a cool coffee, and it takes a very strong / poor man to deny their caramelised lure. Surely the most pleasurable of my pleasures - a taste of two parts pancake to one part orgasm - but their guilt comes two-fold. Firstly, they are sugar-sandwiches of death. Secondly, they are sugar-sandwiches of death that don’t pay tax.

Guilty Pleasure: Magazine

High capacity for use with automatic weapons.

Guilty Pleasure: Website

www.historicalkits.co.uk: Having collected enough to clothe a small village, I have a perverse fetish for football shirts, which this website indulges to its highest level. Who doesn’t get home drunk and try to discover what kit Arsenal were wearing at the inception of Only Fools and Horses? Who doesn’t get home drunk and try to discover what Oxford United looked like during the Falkland’s? Who doesn’t get home drunk and form a top ten list of the worst away kits of the 70s? Who doesn’t actually do all of those things sober as well? Nobody? Mmm. For anybody who now starts doing anything like this, I’m sorry.