In retrospect, Aretha and Crackerjack have much in common

This week the BBC announced plans to bring back the children’s show Crackerjack after a 35-year absence. In a breathless press release that came over like a precocious child, the Beeb announced that “the retro classic will be revitalised for today’s connected generation giving them an all-round, interactive experience while retaining the beating heart of what etched Crackerjack into the affections of British children for three decades”.

In case you are still dithering, then be assured that the resurrected show “will be a heady mix of jaw-dropping magic, laugh-out-loud comedy and silly studio sitcom”.

Never have I felt such a pressing need to wash what’s left of my hair.

Even on a good day, I am sceptical of rejuvenated television, but this strikes me as scraping the bottom of a very empty barrel. Television seems to have fallen out of love with innovation and relies too readily on conjuring up its own past. In almost every genre, this need to revive and replicate has such a calcifying grip on creativity that we run the serious risk of being asphyxiated by the past.

When I think back to what stood out in the past year, it was mostly shows that crackled with the here and now. Bodyguard, with its shifting loyalties and post-war anxieties; The Cry, with its troubling family mysteries; and even Silent Witness and its clever forensic pathology. Three huge BBC shows, which are all in some way about contemporary ideas and emotions. They all seem curious about the world we live in, rather than the half- remembered past.

We live in times where the past is viewed through a misty lens and Brexit has not helped. The fatuous pursuit of past glories and genteel colonisation has mired political progress and infiltrated television. Take a look at any of the network broadcast schedules and you will see stark evidence of a medium that has run out of ideas. One of the BBC’s biggest shows of the era, Strictly Come Dancing, is a modern take on a show that was first launched in 1950 at the height of the post-war ballroom-dancing craze. It is an era of generational sentimentality that has produced Call The Midwife and Father Brown, the implausible village priest who solves murders in the Cotswolds.

This is not solely an issue for the BBC. It has also suffocated the life out of Aretha Franklin’s death, too. Franklin died of pancreatic cancer back in August in her Detroit riverfront apartment. Since then her departure has invited predictable legal disputes over her estate, but more grotesquely has led to a deluge of commemorations and rehashes of her best work.

Aretha Franklin was at her best looking forward

At the 61st Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles last Sunday night a trio of deeply ordinary singers – Yolanda Adams, Fantasia and Andra Day – paid gushing tribute. CBS plans a documentary telecast of another concert and, should you be in Vancouver anytime soon, then an all-white Canadian supper-club band – the Siobhan Walsh Group – star in a commemorative tribute to Lady Soul at the city’s Centennial Theatre.

Commemoration is sucking the life out of creativity and too often we mistake nostalgia for history. To be clear, history challenges and nostalgia comforts. When the BBC understands the difference it produces good television and unlocks fascinating social history. The impressive Who Do You Think You Are is a celebrity journey into the past, but it has been cast to take us to discomforting places: the Holocaust, the Irish famine, the slave trade and to the most demeaning Victorian poverty.

The BBC’s flagship Icons project unwittingly brought this battle between uncomfortable history and national sentimentality to the surface. Unsurprisingly it exposed an imagined exceptionalism that runs through the Brexit debate like a stick of rock. The recent dispute between Ross Greer and Piers Morgan was in many respects a car-crash of ideologies. Greer was seeking to unearth the uncomfortable truths about Winston Churchill while Morgan wanted to sentimentalise his reputation, wrapping Churchill and therefore Britain in unblemished glory.

Stripping aside its harsh language, it was a dispute that reminded us how sensitive Brexit has become, not so much a debate about European market membership but a battle for the soul of Britain. Morgan seemed intellectually incapable of understanding that you can be a galvanising wartime leader and a white supremacist at the same time – the two are not mutually exclusive.

This need to airbrush the past rather than confront challenging truths is indicative of a society that has lost grip of its critical faculties. Too often our television reflects that – why else would television executives insist on putting the words “Great British” in programme titles. Lord only knows what they’re drinking at BBC2 where they broadcast Great British Railway Journeys, The Great British Menu and The Great British Sewing Bee. It would not surprise me if Virginia Wade and Margo from The Good Life are in their commissioning teams.

Channel 4 recently inherited The Great British Bake-Off and baulked at the thought of making changes. Apart from a few forced adjustments to the presenting team, it kept the comforting and nostalgic village fete set-design, with its romantic trinkets and Union flags. The interior, with its Aga chic, Farrow and Ball colour schemes and second-home kitchen layout, is in marked contrast to the rolling hills and arborescent English landscape outside.

The glut of nostalgia that has taken hold of modern media has forced me to question something I thought was settled in my life – Aretha Franklin’s music. But let’s be fair, you can’t have a pop at the BBC and let Aretha off the hook.

In her early Columbia phase, Franklin was too compliant with her record company and at the height of the civil rights movement she recorded soft jazz standards and show tunes, many of them from imagined bygone eras. One particular album, Unforgettable, mistily paid tribute to the recently deceased Dinah Washington and to a bygone era of jazz sophistication. It was an insipid mixture of requiem and remembrance.

It was only when Aretha tackled the contemporary world and her own troubled femininity that she soared like a celestial star. Her definitive 1967 Atlantic album I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You is one of the truly “great” records ever pressed on vinyl. It leads with the era-defining single Respect, a re-versioned song that somehow captured the spirit of feminism and racial desegregation. When she sang about the many injustices of contemporary America in the 1960s, Aretha was special; when she looked back wistfully to the past she fell far from grace.

We all have a nostalgia gene in our bodies, that nagging pleasure that takes us back to a first love, a summer hit, a favourite record, a great teacher or a holiday home that resonates long in our memory, but revisiting the past and rekindling supposedly great lives should always stretch us and not simply reassure.

Whether its Aretha or Crackerjack, we have to differentiate between history and nostalgia and we have the right to be challenged, not sedated.