Stay on the line Banjiman I am sure you will soon be given a lengthy explanation as to why you are wrong.

There are no wrongs or rights here, just different shades of opinion which often need a little clarification. All it takes is a little time really. We do it because we care about such things...

I'm not sure how your post above and this quote from higher up the thread fit together.

It all depends on how you view this business of entertainment. I'm not trying to trivialise anything here - far from it! Simply put, entertainment is collective catharsis through the common cause of narrative tradition. Thus I say the old ballads carry a similar potency to EastEnders, which deals in similar archetypes & provides a similar catharsis and yet is, despite the seriousness of the issues raised, still entertainment. This is the nature of vernacular narrative. When Jade Goody died, one of the immediate folkloric responses was a plethora of 'jokes' - I even opened up a thread here which touched a few righteous nerves, but only because they failed to get the nature of how folklore operates in terms of a broader need for collective healing. Same thing when Diana Spencer died, although there the response was a little different - I saw life-long Anarchist openly weeping on the streets. In such times our hearts are laid bare, collectively and individually.

Entertainment (films, stories, folk songs, paintings, documentaries, art, theatre, poetry, novels, myths, legends, ballads) can make us weep; in doing so it brings us closer to the common cause by letting us know that even in our darkest hours, we are not alone.

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One of the things about storytelling that fascinats me is our inner need for narrative. Crime Novels are popular - as are TV cop shows & procedural dramas; these work in terms of causality and cunning, but also because they go for the common jugular (sometimes quite literally). In our old village we had a particular grisly murder of a young girl that caused quite a stir. As an isolated incident it was raw - too raw to cope will really; apart from the poor victim, a whole community was traumatised simply by not knowing the story. A few days later, a young man was found hanging in the woods. Another very grisly discovery but the relief in community was a collective sigh of 'Aha!'. The story is as old as humanity. Seems the British Media deliberately exploit the fears of our nation by reporting on such atrocities without ever providing the overall contex which is essential to not only the story, but the function of a story, even in real life (especially in real life) where closure is paramount.