A Haunting in Venice.
Have you ever been unfortunate enough to see the Christmas Special of the execrable Not Going Out, the vain and unfunny Lee Mack’s milch-cow? The one where a group of them (they are adults btw) get locked in a supermarket, then spend the whole night running up and down its back-corridors believing they’re encountering/running away from creatures of the night?
Well, A Haunting in Venice is just like that.
Abba – The Movie (a fan event)
It gets the brackets (a fan event) because it promised bonus material for real fans (disclosure, I am a “real” (closet) Abba fan))). That bonus material amounted to this: an advert for the Abba Museum in Stockholm, and their avatar tour, before the film started; and then a sing-a-long audience karaoke session at the end. The actual film, the 1978 docu-movie, was shown, unchanged, between those two bonus additions. Which was a pity, because it is really bad. I, naively thought, that the bonus material would have been to have brought the film up to date with additional material, insightful commentary overlaid, and more backstage footage of Them. Them, Abba. That’s what we went for. Instead, we got the same film of their tour of Australia to promote their new album of the time, Abba Arrival, which meant that most of the songs performed were instantly forgettable. They got away with that at the time, but not now. Now, it’s greatest hits or nothing, thanks.
The premise of the film is that a journalist tracks them round the country compelled by his boss’s order to get an exclusive interview for airing one week later. In 1978 they didn’t have quite the expectations for things like this, that we’ve grown to have today – they didn’t know words like fan fiction; hagiography, they couldn’t distinguish between cynical promotion and a real documentary, they hadn’t seen a mockumentary, let alone know what one might be. This film basically followed Abba about, and pointed the camera at them, confident that their world conquering fame would be enough to see the project through. Unedited, it felt like a teenager’s bedroom YouTube production, the best clips from which, would today be lucky to make a thirty second long segment on a news programme.
What grated most was the endless, filler, Vox pop sections, which now would not be considered interesting enough to make a blooper reel at the end, where ordinary, middle-aged, people in the street, found themselves short of words when asked what it was they liked about Abba. Was it a coincidence that so many of them could only come up with the incongruous and ridiculous, “It’s got a good clean beat to it.” Clean? WTF? The (many) children asked the same question, were just as clueless at providing a coherent answer. And it was they, the children, that really put the tin lid on this dreadful event for me, for whenever there was time to fill; a cut to a new scene, a new set-up to be established; it was done by panning shot across a crowd of schoolchildren chanting, “We want Abba,” over and over again, in that intolerable high-pitched collective chant that only children can produce. I wanted to tear my ears off.
And I haven’t even started on my audience – the phones that never went off; the constant browsing and doom scrolling by close neighbours; the never-ending hum of private conversations; the late arrivals who didn’t know what seat to sit in; the early departures who got up to go to the toilet and couldn’t find their way back. The awfulness of getting old, and realising that you’re next.
Abba got old, then turned themselves into vapour images of their younger selves. As much as that is about achieving a form of immortality, having watched this one last round of mopping up the royalties for their descendants, it feels more like early release of their souls. AND, what is more, having sat in an audience of old people watching them, I know exactly where they’re coming from.
Dickie White's Diary 