T minus 20

Rewind to 5–11 November 2006, when the future was shiny, the gaming was violent and apparently Detroit was the place to put your hands up. Welcome to a week of dodgy technology, digital warfare and music videos that really need explaining.

🖥️ Windows Vista: The Wow Starts Now. Allegedly. Microsoft unleashes its glossy new operating system, complete with transparent windows, futuristic gadgets and security pop-ups asking permission to do absolutely everything. The future has arrived. Please click 'Allow' to continue.

🎮 Call of Duty 3: War. What Is It Good For? Another trip to the battlefields of World War II as Call of Duty drops its third instalment. Developed in just eight months, it's bigger, louder and ready to turn an entire generation into armchair soldiers. And yes, you could even fight the war with a Wii Remote.

🕺 Put Your Hands Up for Detroit: The Future Is Looking Weird. Fedde Le Grand takes the UK charts by storm with an electro-house banger and a music video set in 2027, where scantily clad scientists manufacture men in a futuristic laboratory. With 2027 just around the corner, we're starting to think someone lied to us about the future.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 29 October–4 November 2006 — when Justin Timberlake was dominating pop, McFly were romancing aliens, K-Fed launched the rap career nobody requested and a mysterious illness in London was about to become an international espionage story.

☢️ Something's in the tea
Former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko suddenly falls seriously ill after meeting two men for tea at a London hotel. Doctors don't yet know what's wrong, but the answer — radioactive polonium-210 — will lead investigators through one of the strangest alleged assassinations in modern history.

❤️ JT's still bringing sexy back
Justin Timberlake follows SexyBack with My Love, teaming up with T.I. and Timbaland for another slice of futuristic 2006 pop. At this point Timbaland isn't so much producing the soundtrack to 2006 as apparently producing 2006 itself.

👽 McFly's love is out of this world
McFly hit UK number one with Star Girl, inspired by Tom Fletcher literally dreaming about falling in love with an alien. He wakes up, rewrites an existing song around the dream and scores the band's sixth number one. Songwriting advice: apparently just go to bed.

🔥 K-Fed plays with fire
Kevin Federline releases his debut rap album Playing with Fire on Halloween and critics respond accordingly. With a Metacritic score of 15 and tracks including America's Most Hated, perhaps the warning signs were right there on the packaging.

🪚 Jigsaw would like to play a game. Again.
Saw III takes over Halloween as Jigsaw returns with another collection of elaborate traps, questionable life lessons and absolutely horrific ways to die. By movie three, Saw has officially transformed from surprise indie horror hit into an annual appointment with trauma.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 22–28 October 2006 — a frankly ridiculous week where Fernando Alonso became a two-time world champion, Amy Winehouse went Back to Black, Taylor Swift introduced herself to the world and Batman fought Wolverine with magic tricks.

🏎️ Alonso goes back-to-back
Fernando Alonso finishes second at the Brazilian Grand Prix to secure his second consecutive F1 world championship at just 25. Michael Schumacher charges from the back in what is supposed to be his farewell race while Alonso looks destined to add plenty more titles. Twenty years later… we're still waiting for number three.

🖤 Amy goes Back to Black
At 23, Amy Winehouse releases the album that will define her career: Back to Black. With Rehab, You Know I'm No Good, Tears Dry on Their Own and that enormous title track, Amy turns heartbreak and chaos into a modern soul classic — with no idea it will become her final studio album.

🤠 Meanwhile, some teenager releases an album…
Three days before Amy, 16-year-old Taylor Swift releases her self-titled debut. She's got cowboy boots, enormous curls, songs about high-school boys and a debut single named after Tim McGraw. Surely nothing here that's going to completely reshape the next 20 years of pop culture.

🎩 Are you watching closely?
Christopher Nolan pits Hugh Jackman against Christian Bale in The Prestige, as two Victorian magicians become dangerously obsessed with ruining each other's lives. Michael Caine and Scarlett Johansson join the fun while David Bowie turns up as Nikola Tesla because apparently Batman versus Wolverine wasn't enough.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 15–21 October 2006 — when emo reached its glorious theatrical peak, Hollywood was crawling with creepy ghosts and apparently nobody had explained that terrorist threats posted online still count if you're “only joking”.

🖤 Welcome to the emo national anthem
My Chemical Romance march *Welcome to the Black Parade* all the way to UK number one, armed with military jackets, Gerard Way’s newly bleached hair and one piano note capable of summoning an entire generation.

💿 Akon gets smacked into the charts
Akon teams up with Eminem for *Smack That* — with Eminem not only dropping a verse but producing the track. It rockets 88 places up the US chart before eventually getting stuck at number two… partly thanks to another Akon song.

🏈 Maybe don't threaten seven NFL stadiums?
A radioactive dirty-bomb threat targeting NFL games triggers an FBI investigation. The alleged mastermind? A 20-year-old Wisconsin grocery worker who says it was part of an online competition to see who could write the scariest threat. The FBI remains unimpressed by the creative exercise.

🔫 Fabolous has quite a night
Fabolous gets shot in the thigh, flees in a car, gets pulled over after running a red light then gets arrested when police find loaded guns inside. Oh, and somewhere in this saga is an NBA player's stolen US$50,000 chain. Completely normal Tuesday.

👻 Please stop crawling towards us
*The Grudge 2* hits cinemas and takes the US box-office crown, because 2006 remains firmly committed to terrifying us with long-haired Japanese ghosts. Bonus: star Amber Tamblyn had already been traumatised by another J-horror remake in *The Ring*. Girl, stop answering these casting calls.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 8–14 October 2006 — when Google went shopping for the future, New York looked nervously to the skies, Tina Fey got her own TV show and apparently every man with a guitar had some feelings he urgently needed to discuss.

📹 Google hits Subscribe
YouTube is barely 20 months old, haemorrhaging money on bandwidth and staring down a mountain of copyright problems — so Google casually buys it for US$1.65 billion. At the time: they paid HOW MUCH for a video website? Twenty years later: possibly the greatest Facebook Marketplace bargain in history.

✈️ A terrifying afternoon in Manhattan
Just four days after the Yankees' season ends, pitcher and newly minted pilot Cory Lidle takes a sightseeing flight over New York. His plane crashes into an Upper East Side apartment building, killing Lidle and his instructor and briefly reigniting the city's worst fears. The strange twist? Lidle had only taken up flying the previous year — and had once pitched for the Moneyball Oakland A's.

🎸 Hello, you've reached your ex-boyfriend
Hinder's Lips of an Angel is climbing the charts, serving up one of the great “wait, we thought this was romantic?” songs of the 2000s. He's whispering on the phone to his ex because his current girlfriend is in the next room. Red flags, but make them post-grunge. Meanwhile The Fray's How to Save a Life turns mentoring a troubled teenager into peak 2006 emotional piano-rock and Razorlight's America hits No.1 in the UK.

🌑 The Darkness gets a little too dark
After catsuits, falsetto and I Believe in a Thing Called Love, Justin Hawkins leaves The Darkness while dealing with drug and alcohol addiction. Suddenly the excess that made the band so gloriously ridiculous doesn't seem quite as funny.

🎬 Scorsese sends everyone undercover
The Departed lands with Leonardo DiCaprio infiltrating the mob, Matt Damon infiltrating the cops, Jack Nicholson being terrifying and Mark Wahlberg apparently being paid by the swear word. It will finally earn Martin Scorsese the Best Director Oscar everyone assumed he'd won years ago.

🍋 Good God, Lemon!
30 Rock premieres and introduces us to Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy, Tracy Jordan and a workplace where absolutely nobody should be in charge. Ratings? Fine. Cultural legacy? Enormous. Tina Fey has essentially turned her years behind the scenes at Saturday Night Live into one of the defining sitcoms of the era.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 1 - 7 October 2006 — when secrets were about to get a lot harder to keep, cerulean was absolutely not just blue and television introduced us to a serial killer we were somehow supposed to like.

💻 WikiLeaks enters the chat
Julian Assange launches WikiLeaks with a radical idea: give whistleblowers a way to expose the secrets of the powerful. What starts as a very 2006 internet experiment will eventually unleash classified war files, diplomatic cables and stolen election emails — and put its Australian founder at the centre of a global legal battle.

👠 That's all
The Devil Wears Prada struts into Australian cinemas, giving us Miranda Priestly, Emily's withering one-liners, Nigel's wisdom and the cerulean speech. Twenty years later we're still quoting it, reassessing whether Andy's friends were actually terrible and watching the gang do it all over again.

🩸 Tonight's the night
Dexter premieres and introduces the surprisingly successful concept of a serial killer with a moral code. Michael C. Hall's blood-spatter analyst spends his days solving murders and his nights committing them — and somehow we're on his side.

🏉 Storm warning
The Brisbane Broncos beat Melbourne Storm 15–8 to claim the NRL premiership. A straightforward Grand Final victory at the time, but much juicier in hindsight: Melbourne were already inside the period later exposed as the club's massive salary-cap breach.

🎵 Get out. Leave. Right now. Again.
JoJo is back with Too Little Too Late, because apparently the men did not improve between ages 13 and 15. Meanwhile Ludacris and Pharrell want us to shake our Money Maker and knock SexyBack off the top of the US charts.

🐻 Another talking animal? Groundbreaking.
Open Season hits cinemas with Martin Lawrence as a domesticated grizzly and Ashton Kutcher as a one-antlered deer. It's peak 2006 CGI-animal saturation — but also the very first feature from the studio that would eventually give us Spider-Verse.

📚 A very expensive first draft
Former academic Diane Setterfield lands a whopping £800,000 UK deal for her debut novel The Thirteenth Tale. Publishers bet huge on a Gothic mystery from an unknown author — and, inconveniently for anyone hoping for publishing-industry schadenfreude, it becomes a bestseller.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 25–30 September 2006, when Facebook opened the gates, Five became four and Jackass once again tested the limits of human anatomy.

📱 Facebook lets everybody in
Got an email address? Congratulations, you can now join Facebook. Just weeks after freaking everyone out with the new News Feed, the former college-only network opens to the general public. Pokes, Walls, relationship-status drama and regrettable photo tags are coming for us all.

🏟️ The Saints come home
Thirteen months after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Saints return to the Superdome. U2 and Green Day perform, 70,000 fans pack the stadium and Steve Gleason's blocked punt helps turn a football game into an unforgettable moment for New Orleans.

🤕 Jackass goes bigger, grosser and considerably less insurable
Jackass Number Two hits cinemas with bulls, snakes, rockets, leeches and Steve-O literally dangling himself as shark bait. Somehow, this was a major studio film.

🦸 Save the cheerleader, save the world
Heroes arrives on NBC and suddenly we're all extremely invested in ordinary people discovering superpowers, Hiro Nakamura yelling "Yatta!" and figuring out exactly what the hell is going on with that cheerleader.

👓 Apparently this is “ugly”
Ugly Betty premieres, introducing America Ferrera as Betty Suarez — a smart, ambitious outsider entering the brutal world of fashion armed with braces, glasses and the apparently unforgivable crime of wearing colourful clothes.

5️⃣ Five are back! All four of them!
Five announce their reunion without Sean Conlon and offer the only explanation necessary: “Five's a brand not a number.” Honestly, no notes.

🤓 White & Nerdy takes over
Weird Al goes Straight Outta Lynwood, turns Chamillionaire's “Ridin'” into “White & Nerdy” and scores the biggest hit of his career — helped by the rapidly growing power of internet video.

📖 Everyone loves a secret society
Brad Meltzer's The Book of Fate brings us assassination attempts, Freemasons, Thomas Jefferson codes and shadowy Washington conspiracies. Because if the mid-2000s taught us anything, it's that every historical building was probably hiding a clue.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 18–24 September 2006, when your car had an ashtray, your phone definitely wasn't connected to it and turning on the interior light was, according to every dad, a jailable offence.

🚗 Booster seats, but make it generational — New child-restraint laws hit Britain, requiring kids to use a booster until age 12 or 135cm. We use it as an excuse to remember the family cars of our childhood: cigarette smoke, manual windows, street directories, station-wagon boot seating and the parental arm across your chest as an emergency restraint.

🚀 Hammond's 300mph horror crash — A Top Gear stunt turns terrifying when Richard Hammond crashes the jet-powered Vampire at nearly 300mph, suffering a serious brain injury in the show's most infamous accident.

🎮 Australia gets Good Game — Junglist and Kapowski plonk themselves on an old ABC couch and launch a show dedicated entirely to video games. What starts on ABC2 becomes a cult institution, spawns Spawn Point and proves gamers might actually watch television when television bothers talking to them.

👖 Chingy's checking out dem jeans — Hoodstar arrives with Pullin' Me Back, Dem Jeans and Chingy's continuing commitment to rhymes that sound suspiciously nursery-adjacent. Naturally, Sing a Song of Sixpence is called in for testing.

🕺 Scissor Sisters don't wanna dance — Elton John plays piano, Jake Shears brings the falsetto and I Don't Feel Like Dancin’ becomes an enormous dancefloor hit despite being explicitly about wanting absolutely no part of the dancefloor.

🏈 The Rock gets serious — Before he was Dwayne Johnson: Global Movie Franchise, The Rock coaches juvenile offenders through American football in Gridiron Gang, while Monster House reminds children that sometimes their irrational fear of the creepy neighbour's house is entirely justified.

📚 Hot mic, cold reception — Anna Quindlen's Rise and Shine sends America's favourite breakfast-TV host into crisis after one spectacularly ill-timed hot-mic moment — while Goodreads readers respond with the devastating literary equivalent of a shrug: three stars.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 10–16 September 2006, when Pluto's replacement got a name that perfectly matched the chaos, Michael Schumacher shocked Formula One, Dog the Bounty Hunter found himself on the wrong side of the law and Justin Timberlake proved sexy was, in fact, making a comeback.

🪐 Meet Eris... the planet that wasn't. The object that helped get Pluto kicked out of the planetary club was officially named Eris, the Greek goddess of discord. Fitting, considering astronomers are still arguing about Pluto two decades later. Oh, and it was almost called Xena after the warrior princess. Science really missed an opportunity there.

🏎️ Schumacher says goodbye... sort of. Fresh off a win at Monza, Michael Schumacher announced he'd retire at the end of the season while still chasing an eighth world championship. It felt like the end of an era... until he surprised everyone by coming back a few years later.

🤠 Dog gets collared. Reality TV's most famous bounty hunter, Dog Chapman, was arrested over his role in capturing convicted rapist Andrew Luster in Mexico years earlier. It's one of those wonderfully bizarre headlines where the guy whose whole job is arresting people suddenly needed someone to post his own bail.

🎤 Timberlake brings sexy back. Justin Timberlake dropped FutureSex/LoveSounds, the album that transformed him from former boyband heartthrob into one of pop's biggest solo stars. "SexyBack", "My Love", "What Goes Around... Comes Around"—it wasn't just an album, it was a cultural reset powered by Timbaland beats.

🧙 Pretty boys with powers. The Covenant hit cinemas with magic, muscles and enough Abercrombie energy to power an entire shopping centre. Critics rolled their eyes, but hindsight has been much kinder to this gloriously over-the-top supernatural teen flick packed with future stars.

💔 Operation: John Tucker Must Die. Before revenge plots unfolded via Instagram Stories, four girls teamed up to destroy the school's biggest heartbreaker the old-fashioned way. Flip phones, pop-punk and deliciously petty payback—it doesn't get much more 2006 than that.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

Rewind to 3–9 September 2006, when Australia lost two legends, Paris Hilton discovered being rich couldn't get you out of probation and Sean Paul had every dancefloor speaking fluent gibberish.

🐊 Crikey... Australia says goodbye to Steve Irwin
The world lost its favourite wildlife warrior in a tragedy that still feels impossible to believe. After a lifetime wrestling crocodiles, dodging venomous snakes and getting far too close to just about every dangerous animal on Earth, Steve's story ended in the most unexpected way imaginable. Twenty years on, his conservation legacy is bigger than ever.

🏁 The King of the Mountain takes his final lap
Just four days later, Australia was in mourning again as Peter Brock was killed during the Targa West rally. The man who conquered Bathurst nine times didn't die on the mountain that made him famous, making the loss feel even more surreal. It was a heartbreaking week that marked the end of two uniquely Australian icons.

👑 Paris checks in... then checks into jail
A Hollywood DUI arrest was only the beginning. Paris Hilton's legal troubles would snowball into one of the biggest celebrity media circuses of the 2000s, complete with "Free Paris" T-shirts, helicopter chases and enough tabloid coverage to make today's gossip cycle look restrained.

🎤 Sean Paul still had us all mumbling along
Give It Up To Me landed with Keyshia Cole in tow, proving once again that nobody needed to understand Sean Paul's lyrics to know every single word. Peak 2000s dancehall, peak club anthem and another reminder that he quietly owned the decade.

Send us Fan Mail

Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.