Buying recent cultural artefacts for pals is always a bit of a gamble. Still, it's worth having a punt on a few 2018 movies and DVDs. Greta Gerwig's delightful Lady Bird – available in a Blu Ray with digital download – stars Saoirse Ronan in a teen movie for the ages. Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here, featuring Joaquin Phoenix as a troubled man saving children from the sex trade, will suit only the more robust members of the family. If you have a Paul Thomas Anderson fan in the house, then they will take to the extras – a fashion show and interesting camera tests – on the DVD and Blu-ray of that director's dark, dark romance, Phantom Thread.
Sound a bit gloomy? Fear not. The ultimate party DVD is to hand. The two-disc sing-along edition of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again –a film that was five times better than it needed to be – comes crammed with 75 minutes of bonus features, including a version that encourages you to bellow along with Meryl, Cher and their younger incarnations. It will sell billions.
If you take to Cher's version of Fernando, then be aware that the great lady has released an entire album of Abba tunes. Auto-tuned in the approved Cher fashion, Dancing Queen (what else might it be called?) could hardly be more festive if it came wrapped in tinsel and party lights.
If you fancy a more outré album, then lunge towards one of the year's best hip hop releases: Noname's Room 25 builds loose, funky, jazz-influenced hooks around pulsing rhymes from a gifted Chicagoan who came up through the slam poetry scene.
There were few better rock albums this year than Lush by Snail Mail. Older fans may groan on hearing that Lyndsay Jordan, who goes by that name, was born in 1999 and may be further depressed to experience the maturity of her confessional, intimate song-writing. Get over it.
Pure noise is good too. The shouting in Deafheaven's Ordinary Corrupt Human Love fairly makes the ears bleed, but the San Francisco band also have a gift for jangly melodies that stick in the head.
The 2018 album that's hardest to dislike may, however, be Janelle Monáe's eclectic, tuneful, irresistible Dirty Computer. Stuffed with collaborations, the album swings from hip hop to R'n'B to the purest pop. Not to be ignored.
All that noted, it is often best to lean towards the tried and tested when buying gifts. The virtual stores are virtually groaning with excellent audio re-issues. Someone you really, really (really) love deserves the 50th anniversary repackaging of The Band's Music from Big Pink. The hugely generous (if expensive) treatment of that classic 1968 album comes with five discs, loads of documentation and a version of the original record pressed as a double-LP at 45rpm. Okay then.
The same people will also go for the latest addition to Bob Dylan's The Bootleg Series. More Blood, More Tracks, six discs in its largest incarnation, focuses on – you're way ahead of us – outtakes and oddities from Bob's immortal Blood on the Tracks.
Also spare an ear for Cinema, a huge tribute to the late German experimentalist Holger Czukay, and – on a more modest scale for people you love less – new material from Prince in Piano & a Microphone 1983 and the great saxophonist John Coltrane in Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album.
Break out the DVD boxed sets. The Americans, an addictive, delicious series about Soviet spies in 1980s' America, came to a close this year and all six series are now available in one essential box. For those in search of something older and more sedate, the entirety of Upstairs Downstairs has been crammed onto 21 discs and then into a handsomely mounted box. That should do you until Christmas 2030.
What not to buy?
Never buy contemporary pop music for anybody under the age of 18 unless you too were born in this century. You think you know better? Just recall the Gilbert O'Sullivan album (or something less ancient) you had to pretend to like when deaf Aunt Nora came to stay in 1974 (or sometime less antediluvian). Please, please check which games console the little jerks have before buying them the wrong version of the completely brilliant Red Dead Redemption 2. If you do buy the family a box of some endless TV series, then have the grace to not repeatedly check how far they've got. Or do. If you don't like them, the strategy is an effective way of instilling nagging guilt. Oh, and never, ever buy anyone a West Wing collection. No real reason. I just don't like it.
Roddy Doyle’s suggestions
Roddy Doyle, whose film Rosie wowed critics earlier in the year, is on board with the young artists who are changing jazz.
"Your Queen is a Reptile by Sons of Kemet, a bunch of young lads playing wild jazz, is so exhilarating, I'm tempted to write 'very exhilarating'," he says. "Kamasi Washington's Heaven and Earth is wonderful, and the vinyl package is a thing of real beauty. I'd been listening to it for a month before I discovered a hidden EP, cleverly embedded in the sleeve – so cleverly embedded, it took me all day to free it."
He also has two recent DVDs to recommend. "A Quiet Place is great, scary, clever fun and stars your man from the American version of The Office," he raves. "The credits rolls and you realise: 'Oh, he directed it too – and co-wrote it'. Then you do a Google and find out: 'Oh, he's married to your woman who plays his wife'. I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck's film about the great writer James Baldwin, is one of the best documentaries I've seen. The archive footage, the words, music, the structure, Baldwin himself, Kendrick Lamaar's fury during the closing credits – it's just magnificent."
Roddy Doyle's next book, Charlie Savage, will be published in March 2019
