I started this blog first and foremost because I'm passionate about storytelling, in any form. I appreciate the simple joy of experiencing a work of art for the first time, and that's what entertainment really is when you get right down to it.
From the humble to extravagant, the derivative to the inspired, whether we love them or hate them. And when they're at their best, they're quite simply remarkable. They have the power to tell stories that uplift our spirits, captivate our imaginations, stir the sense of adventure, or test the limits of our fears. They give us glimpses of fantastical worlds beyond our own existence, presenting ideas that question our assumptions or broaden our horizons.
They give us mighty heroes who inspire us to try harder than we thought necessary, reach further than we thought possible, or risk more than we thought possible. And they give us antagonists and villains who explore our deepest fears, challenge our insecurities, and question our deepest held convictions.
Stories can do all these things and more. They explore the universal experiences of our lives, they stir emotions regardless of our race, colour or creed, they help to bring us together through our shared experiences, and passions, and fears, and help remind us that we have more in common with each other than we think.
In short, they represent the best of what it means to be human.
But all is not well. Like a lot of you, I've noticed a change in recent years. Our entertainment industries have been under attack, our stories are being sanitized and twisted to serve political agendas, our heroes are being neutered and marginalized, as Hollywood studios try in vain to dance to the everchanging tune of social media activists and perpetually offended serial complainers.
Old classics are being remade and repackaged by creatively bankrupt studios trying in vain to cash in on nostalgia and name recognition. Our childhood heroes are being wheeled out only to be humiliated and downtrodden to elevate the success of cheap, inferior copies. And everything from the past is being prefaced with idiotic 'warnings' about cultural appropriation, our beloved characters are retooled into being vehicles for present day woke agendas. As a result, the stories themselves are often terribly written even on a fundamental level.
All this does is hurt the value of entertainment itself, and cause a divide where they would previously unite. Stories of the past featured timeless and universal themes and had applicability to everyone, yet today's stories will inevitably become dated to the period that it's in.
And this change has only been accelerated by a dying mainstream media, desperate for views and attention at any cost, to jump on any bandwagon it can find, to delay their inevitable collapse.
It is currently being reported that 550 households a day are cancelling their TV licence, and despite the increase in the number of UK households, this is not being matched by take-up of the licence.
People no longer need to synchronise their viewing with broadcast times and will watch programmes on catch-up services. They are also making greater use of commercial streaming services and ditching terrestrial broadcasters completely. The TV licence is increasingly redundant, because people can get all the media they want without watching broadcasts or using the BBC’s increasingly uncompetitive woke-polluted iPlayer service.
The result of all of this is a gradual erosion of narrative quality, thematic depth, artistic meaning, and, well, actual fun in entertainment. The stories we tell are no longer universal and timeless. They've become vapid and shallow, mired in present day cultural angst, and weighed down by clumsy attempts to pander to politics embraced only by an uncessecarily vocal few whose views are not shared by the majority of people. The stories which used to unite us now serve to stoke the fires to division, resentment and petty bickering.
In short, every facet of entertainment we consume today is under threat.
And this worries me, because I'm old enough to remember when things were different. I can appreciate the quality of the stories we used to tell, and I can see what damage we're doing to our artists of today.
The next generation of moviegoers and filmmakers, such as my eager-eyed 10 year old nephew, is going to grow up in a world where this ridiculous state of affairs is the norm. They won't have that experience needed to strive for something better, and I think we'll all suffer as a result.
But I don't think it has to be this way.
We don't have to lie down and accept the gradual erosion of our art, entertainment and culture. The decline can be reversed through the most fundamental mechanism of all: Money.
You can have all the political ideology you want, but ultimately if enough people refuse to support products like this, and instead give their money to studios and developers and artists who's only goal is to tell good stories, then the entertainment industry will have a simple choice: Listen to your market, or go out of business.
So I guess that's what this blog is really about. In my own small, heavily cynical way, it's about calling out these failings when I see them. It's about encouraging people to see through the fancy special effects and big budgets to understand the flawed, derivative, meaningless stories that lie beneath, and to resist the checkboxes and just let their imaginations run wild without worrying about who gets mildly offended or not.
To get back to understanding the real mechanics of storytelling. And where possible, it's about recognizing movies, TV shows and video games, that buck this trend and dare to focus on what's actually important.
Entertainment.