When Should a Celebration not be a Celebration?

Three events this year have forced me to worry about the state of the world. You may be thinking things like the credit crunch, or the terrorist attack in India, but you would be wrong. We will always have terror and we will always have economic slumps. These aren't news and so they don't make me worry.

No, instead, these are the three events:

• Mamma Mia makes more money at the box office than The Dark Knight in the UK, and is probably going to beat it in DVD sales too.
• The Tales of Beedle the Bard, the latest book that is mildly related to Harry Potter, sells a ridiculous amount in the week it is released.
• I finish watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and am faced with the fact that another well-written, intelligent show has been cancelled WAY too soon.

Now let me state now that this isn't some hate rant on various media that I don't like. I didn't mind Mamma Mia and I have read and enjoyed the Harry Potter books. So, this isn't a rant on the quality, it is a rant on the celebrated status they have achieved.

Why, oh world, must we celebrate mediocrity?!

Mamma Mia will never go down in the history books as an amazing film. It isn't even the best musical made. It is made up of crowbarred Abba songs on a loose plot. And yet, when asked to pick the year's best actress, the British public voted Meryl Streep and nominated Piece Brosnan.

You might like the cheese, or the songs. But there is no way any logical person could honestly tell me with a straight face that the film contained even the remotest trace of a good performance.

And here we are, giving out rewards to something that isn't smart, or well-made, but just fun.

Harry Potter seems to have been given some kind of special treatment too. First, the series has somehow managed to find its way onto the regular fiction shelf, as opposed to the Fantasy section it belongs in. Then, people seem to have ignored the fact that the last few books are extremely overwritten; The Goblet of Fire's first act lasts for 450-odd pages. Also, nothing even happens in the sixth book!

The series is formulaic and written in a very workman-like way. I can give her credit and say that she picked up on childhood dreams and created a fairly convincing world, but this does not entitle the books to be treated like the gold that they are.

And I can forgive people for this. The series ended (rather anti-climatically) a while ago, so I could just forget it all.

So why am I now selling hundreds of copies of a new Harry Potter based book!? The thing is tiny, yet is going for the same price as a normal book. People are paying too, and to read what? A collection of short stories, which are just retellings of older myths and legends!

It is nothing amazing and nothing new and yet, with the tag of Harry Potter stamped onto it, people flock.

These are two recent examples, but there are many more. People are gravitating towards the mindless entertainment. This, in itself, is fine, as long as people can acknowledge what they are consuming for what it is: Mindless!

Madness ensues when people reward the mindless and the banal.

And then a show comes along that challenges. The scripts are razor-sharp, and the plot balances humour and drama perfectly. It requires you to think, and doesn't hand you everything on a shiny, silver exposition plate.

And no-one watches it.

Come on people! Stop being happy with mediocrity and challenge yourselves once in a little while. Read something which won prizes or watch a raved-about indie! As a society, we can't numb our brains on the average. And we certainly shouldn't celebrate it.

That way, Armageddon lies.

:D