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Your childhood is under attack. One by one, the entertainment industry is systematically dismantling all your golden memories in the most obscene way possible. Look what it's done to Paddington Bear. The first images from the new Paddington movie show him looking gaunt and haunted, like he's just spent the night tearfully attempting not to stab you to death in your sleep. New Paddington still likes marmalade sandwiches, obviously, but only to wipe across his torso as part of a ritual to appease the dark lord Satan. Another happy memory down the drain.
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It doesn't stop there, either. It's just been announced that there's going to be a Danger Mouse reboot, where Danger Mouse has got some sort of iPad attached to his face. The new Postman Pat film? Full of Terminators. All the happy innocence of your youth, vanished without trace. It's enough to make you weep, or crawl under the table, jam your hands over your ears and sing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme tune over and over again until it all goes away.
Or at least it is if you're the sort of dimwit who actively subscribes to the notion of nostalgia. The reaction to the Danger Mouse news, from people my age in particular, has been dismal – teetering between ironic "I remember Danger Mouse" sub-reminiscences and outright fear that it won't be as good as the thing they watched in their pyjamas when they were six.
Obviously the correct response to this news is to ignore it, because it's about a children's cartoon and you're now a sensible adult with a creatively unsatisfying yet financially secure job in middle management. You have more important things to do than revel in a falsely idealised past. Any time you spend taking part in a terrible Which Ironic 1980s Haircut Are You? online quiz is time that could be spent earning money to provide for your loved ones, you backwards-looking ninny.
There's a chance that I might be slightly overreacting here, but I really do hate nostalgia. I hate the idea that creativity peaked with The Clangers, or that Wagon Wheels used to be bigger, or that Button Moon was a timeless work of art and not an endless, tedious, imagination-free wasteland where a bloke dangled a spoon from a bit of string inside a dark cupboard for 10 minutes at a time in the hope that it'd shut annoying kids up. Things weren't better when you were a kid. They were just as crap as they are now. The only difference is that you used to be stupider.
Danger Mouse … reboot alert. Photograph: FremantleMedia Ltd/Rex
Want proof? Fine. The internet exists now. Remember The Frog Song? Try watching it on YouTube. It's 14 minutes long. Paul McCartney does all the voices. Nothing happens, some frogs sing a song, then nothing else happens and then it ends. I guarantee that you won't be able to watch the whole thing. And I enjoyed The Frog Song as a kid – not because it was great, but because I was an idiot with an undeveloped brain. I used to enjoy Fingermouse too, for crying out loud, and that was just a bloke playing a trumpet with a paper cone on his bloody hand. God, I used to be such a dickhead.
Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. It's a signifier that you hate how your life has turned out. It's a sign that you've mentally locked off, and you're doomed to spend the rest of life drifting in a false reverie of a past that didn't exist. Nostalgia is why Tim Lovejoy still dresses like it's 1996 and is primed to weep the moment anyone mentions Ocean Colour Scene to him. It's why all your Facebook friends spend their days in a whirlwind of incredulous bafflement at the passing of time, forever asking people to like JPEGs about conkers, all because they're trapped in a loveless marriage to a woman they accidentally knocked up after ironically slow-dancing to I Want To Know What Love Is during a hideous School Disco party.
This isn't a generational thing, incidentally. Everyone's guilty of it. When I was growing up, I distinctly remember having teachers who would reminisce about their wartime evenings in Anderson shelters. Give them a time machine and the first thing they would do is dart back and relive their glory days shivering in a hole next to a bucket of wee, constantly awaiting terrifying death from above. At least you're only nostalgic about Blind Date.
I hate nostalgia so much that I've probably tilted too far in the opposite direction. To avoid becoming complacent, I've compensated by actively hating anything that happened in the past. I've become convinced that my entire childhood was spent eating poison in a ditch. I hate everything that isn't happening now. I just reread the first line of this column, and it made me furious because I wrote it half an hour ago, back when everything was awful.
This is clearly a step too far, but it's better than indulging in pointless nostalgia. So let's all just do the normal adult thing and ignore the new Paddington Bear movie. It clearly wasn't designed for us. And let's make a pact to end nostalgia for good. Better that we do it now than in 20 years, when we'll have to make it through the inevitable round of ironic Gangnam Style retrospectives.
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