Everywhere you look, nostalgia is big business. What do I mean by nostalgia in this context? Well, it’s anything whose intrinsic value is based on rekindling previous memories. Let’s start with the film and tv industry. Remakes continue to be all the range – what prompted this blog was my reading earlier today that 80s TV series Manimal is being remade. Quite why is another question. It was a rubbish idea the first time. Struggling to remember it? It was that TV series featuring British actor Simon MacCorkindale who was a crime fighting professor who could transform himself into any animal. Except most of his transformations involved him turning into a falcon or a black panther… and I recall once into a dolphin. It lasted just one series.  Because it was rubbish. Quite whether they will make it any better second time round, we will see. The sad fact is that I will in all likelihood watch the remake, because even though Manimal wasn’t good telly, it’s still a part of my childhood. Just like I watched the very poor remake of Knight Rider (well, it was more a continuation than a remake). And the fact that remakes, old bands reforming, comedians making a living out of reminding us of how things were when we were much younger, are so common place now, for me justifies this point that nostalgia is big business.

I was lucky enough to see the Stone Roses reform and play a quite brilliant set at Heaton Park, Manchester earlier this year. I loved it. I was there with my best friends, and a crowd of 70,000 people, made up predominantly of middle aged, boozed up men, in a wet field, singing and dancing to songs which were well over 20 years old by a band whose members were approaching 50. It took me back…to my youth…to a different time in my life. Was the music any good? If I took a teenager along who had never heard of the Roses what would they think? Would they enjoy it as much? Of course not because they will have no feelings of nostalgia for the band and for a younger period of our collective lives. That’s not to devalue the quality of the musicianship of the Roses – they played brilliantly. But I think what I felt, and what the vast majority of people there felt, was rooted in our yearning to remember and re-experience the past, rather than just the quality of the music. It was about how it made us feel.

Peter Kay’s comedy is rooted in nostalgia – his live shows are filled with references to the past. “Quick, finish what you’re saying before the pips go!” is one such line – who remembers the pips? And we laugh and have that warm fuzzy feeling as we remember when that was everyday vocabulary. His TV shows are the same – references to the “Karate Kid” and “Dirty Dancing” in “Max and Paddy’s Road To Nowhere”. Probably my all time favourite comedy series, “Spaced” by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes, is littered with links to past films, TV series and music, that were a massive part of my growing up,  so much so that on the DVD of the second series, you can turn on a “Homagemeter” to point such things out.

The danger with creative output based on nostalgia is that it can lead to easy, lazy output. When it’s done well, like in “Spaced”, it’s brilliant.  Here you’re doffing your hat to influences, things you have loved in the past, but using them to create something new. If you’re a band and you reform, you can get away with it if “you’ve still got it”; in other words you’re capable of recreating those same feelings in your audience as you did the first time you were around. But there are just too many remakes coming out of Hollywood and TV generally now, too many bands reforming because they can make a quick buck, all of which for me play on people’s nostalgic desire to recapture former feelings of an earlier time.