Entertainment from beyond the grave

On this most spooky of nights, I feel it my duty to warn you that the ghosts of entertainment past are back to haunt us... and they’re after our cash!

BOO! Now that I’ve got your attention, there’s something you need to know about long-departed musicians and TV stars... they’re coming back from beyond the grave! WoOOooo!

Thirty odd years ago, a typical teenage day for me would have involved quite a lot of rocking out to Queen and Pink Floyd albums, getting on down to a spot of Michael Jackson (if I was feeling funky, obviously) and, after tea, chuckling along to an episode of Dad’s Army.

Right now, I can stick the radio on and hear new tunes from Freddie & Co (including one with MJ) and get all melancholy at Pink Floyd being poignant on a track from their new album. Impressive stuff, especially when you take into account how long it is since Freddie Mercury passed away (23 years!), that’s it’s been over five years since Jacko departed, and even the Floyd’s ace keyboardist, Rick Wright, left us six years ago now.

Even the very recently deceased Alvin Stardust has a new album out.

Then there’s Dad’s Army, marching back to the big screen soon, with an entirely new parade ground of actors. Considering that precious few of the original cast are still alive, that’s unsurprising. Judging from the cast list and the first photos from filming appearing this week, it looks to be faithfully recreating even the look of original actors.

I’m not complaining (which may come as a surprise) mind you. New tunes from my favourite artists? A film version of a show I loved as a kid, a teenager and an adult? Bring it on!

But why now? Why are all these lovely audio/visual delights appearing when they could theoretically have come out at any point in the last decade or so?

I suspect I’ve already answered my own ghoulish question – because I like them. Or, more precisely, because people of my age like them. And what are some of these people doing now, when they aren’t complaining about how expensive everything is and why stuff isn’t as good as it used to be?

They’re in positions of authority at record labels, film production companies, and all the other places where reminiscing about their youth, and wishing they could get some more of the stuff they enjoyed as teenagers, allows them to turn their happy remembrances into reality.

With a trawl through the archives, a dash of research identifying that an audience with a penchant for the past (and the available funds to get it) are plentiful, some eye of newt and 45 minutes at Gas Mark 4, and it’s – Hey Presto! – Christmas cash for the surviving artists and happy, middle-aged, punters all round.

The next logical step is having everything lined up for the exact moment someone pops their clogs. Spooky indeed.

Happy Halloween.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 31st of October 2014. You can view it on the paper's website here if you like, where it is accompanied by a suitably terrifying picture. Of me.

The idea that quite a few musical/TV projects were in the offing, featuring the deceased, wandered it's way into my befuddled brain whilst travelling home from work one night several weeks ago. Realising that my column would coincide with Halloween seemed like a great time to use it, so it hung around on a scrap of paper, hastily scrawled in the car, for a while before being used.

Oddly, the car seems to be a fertile location for ideas to form, but largely unsuitable for capturing them. I've come up with a method of remembering stuff by repeating two key words repeatedly in my head for each useful phrase or sentence (which is usually all I've got before I start writing), but that's not exactly fool proof.

It's fair to say that the inside of my bottom of the range Mitsubishi Colt contains the decaying corpses of some fine ideas that never made it out. May they rest in peace.

(This posting tapped up to the sound of BBC Radio 2's excellent "Sound of the Sixties" show.)

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