Mamma Mia! mania abounds. I've never seen the stage show, never wanted to. It's sounds awful, though someone I work with got a couple of free tickets and left the theatre thinking 'why do I watch all these dreary plays when all I really need is this?', and vowed to see as many musicals as possible because they lifted her mood.
Well good for her.
But it doesn't do it for me. The clips I've seen of this film look stunningly bad. I saw one of Merly Streep emoting while singing The Winner Takes It All at the edge of a cliff, while Pierce Brosnan just stood there looking dumb, and it was REALLY bad, embarrassingly over the top. I stood rooted to the spot with horror. But it's got good 'buzz' as they say in the biz.
So let's talk about our life with Abba.
We've all had one, if we're over a certain age. When I was a teen, everyone liked Abba (or is it ABBA?). We queued around the block to see ABBA: The Movie. You couldn't avoid them. I remember them winning the Eurovision Song Contest and that was it, a radio staple forevermore. The only single of theirs I ever bought though, was Knowing Me, Knowing You, but I liked the odd hit. By the time Auntie Barbara was practising her tap-dancing to Super Trouper in the kitchen, however, it was all over for me. I'd kind of gone off them anyway. Well, punk happened, you see. Then ska. Then came the New Romantics. By the time they split up I'd completely exorcised them from my life. They seemed obsolete and daftly 1970s. An embarrassment.
I didn't give them a second thought until about 1988 when I chanced across a video of their hits and realised how many great hits there actually were. By this time of course, they'd become kitschy camp - look at those outfits, ahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!, etc. Then there was Erasure, Muriel's Wedding, Bjorn Again - they didnt' stand a chance of being taken seriously ever again.
Miraculously, that's all changed. MOJO did an ABBA cover a few years ago and eveyrone realised what complex songs they wrote and sang and a legend was properly born. Now I look at them differently. Still not keen on Gimme, Gimme, Gimme and Does Your Mother Know, and all the late period disco numbers though.
But now this and they're happening all over again. Still, it's totally and utterly inoffensive to hear ABBA songs everywhere. It could be worse, it could be Simply Red.
For the record, my favourite is The Name Of The Game.
Still don't want to see that film though.
