By Alex Allen
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A bit like Big Brother this year, I've managed, until now, to keep well out of the Mamma Mia phenomenon. Don't want to know who got evicted, don't want to know who is presenting Little Brother this year, eat your sandwich unspecific work colleague. I'm glad about that, it's the kind of situation where people realise that I'd only end up spoiling the film for others by basically reciting the gist of this article out loud and leave me to it. But for whatever reason, and I don't want to talk about it, I've now seen it. For whatever reason, we (this country) like(s) ABBA. If you don't like ABBA, then you at least know every single song they've released, even if you only know it through humming. That's better than most bands. It's in our culture now, Eurovision happened and now Waterloo is burnt in to everyone's subconscious forever. But that doesn't mean we should just accept it. It isn't a good thing. Think of it like the George Bush administration. Yes it was terrible, yes it will always be there, but there's still hope. There's always hope. We can, and should, hope for an ABBA free world by 2050.
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Films like Mamma Mia don't help. I actually think they should be distributed like pornography - top shelf, brown paper bag and a healthy dose of shame. Instead, Mamma Mia has become the highest grossing film in the country ever. This now makes me think that I'm the one not getting it. That it's me that's out of touch. It's official, we've all gone completely fucking mental. Let's look through the cast, shall we? Colin Firth! Playing the only role he knows. It's an ABBA musical, there are no horse drawn carriages or pork chop sideburns here, get off the screen Colin! Julie Walters, fresh from doing that advert about fire alarms. Pierce Brosnan, surely wishing he'd stuck at being James Bond, and Meryl Streep, who seems to have had sex with everyone else in the film. I think I speak for the entire male community when I say 'urrrgh.' Walters, Streep and another one wander around, cackling away like a walking online bingo advert, sporadically breaking out in to song in what I imagine an all singing, all dancing version of Calendar Girls (another film I will never see, old people aren't fun, no matter what Last of the Summer Wine tries to tell us) would have a been like.
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The trouble is, this is a classic. It's too late to stop it now, it's happened. It's this generation's Grease. You can pencil it in for 3PM BBC1 Christmas Day 2019, it's a near certainty. When you hear that cinemas have started to screen sing along showings for it, the questions that have to be asked are, has this actually become a cult? Will there be a sequel? And is it time to batten down the hatches, stock up on canned food and head underground to the bomb shelter until it all blows over? I think the answer to all three is unfortunately and categorically yes.
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