I think about this a lot. Maybe there isn’t any art that is good or bad by itself, it is made one or the other by whether we remember it. So for instance, YouTube just chucked a “20 Famous TV Themes” video at me and every single one was shite altogether, except for the five I remembered, which were were all masterpieces of musical construction.

And then I went to see a reunion concert from a group that with infinite regret must now be called the Pensioners from Fame. They put on a good show, they put on a good night, but last weekend I watched the recording and now it felt like they were constrained by the past. Songs written very quickly on a 1980s TV show’s schedule felt thinner than the 2022 concert treated them. Putting it back on a screen should have worked, but they became tunes to remind you of what they used to sound like, or what you were like when you first listened to them. They weren’t songs that stirred much more than memory.

Though to be fair, there were songs I didn’t know and they weren’t bad.

I stopped watching Fame when it went into first-run syndication. You’re looking at me now. For its first two seasons, it was on NBC network TV and was shot on film. Then NBC dropped it, but everywhere outside the US loved this show so much that they paid for it to continue, they just didn’t pay enough. So the last four seasons were shot on video and even all that time ago, the drop in image quality was too much for me. So there were songs at the reunion concert that I’d not heard before, and the cast included actors I hadn’t seen before.

So with them, I was freed from the memory and the associations that are forever locked to the songs I did know. Yet it still felt as if what was being celebrated at the reunion was a memory seen from so very far away.

Still, by chance I also recently got to write about Fame for the Birmingham Hippodrome’s theatre programme as they put on the stage version. I got to say that bit about NBC cancelling it and the BBC putting up some cash. I also got to say, which I so strongly believe, that the original film by Christopher Gore was far more about failure than fame and, incidentally, I still rate the movie’s music highly.

What I didn’t get to say because there wasn’t room, it wasn’t relevant to the piece and because I’m not entirely sure anyone would have believed, is what a writer of the TV show went on to do next. Ira Steven Behr went from the bright and cheery Fame to the bleakest but also the best of the Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine.

I have no idea why that pleases me so much.