INTRODUCTION
Entertainment is a guiding principle in the making and receiving of the arts and media. These essays address some of the meanings and implications of this.

Entertainment is an idea, one that is both historically and culturally specific. While pleasure has surely always been intended and taken in artefacts and performances, the idea of entertainment is distinctive in its emphasis on the primacy of such pleasure, ahead or even instead of practical, sacred, instructional or political aims and functions. This is touched on in chapters 2 and 5 ('The idea of entertainment', 'Entertainment and utopia'). Cultural developments since 1900 suggest that entertainment, at any rate in the forms discussed here, may also be historically specific in another sense, namely that it may now be on the way out, and this is addressed in a brief, speculative concluding essay, 'The waning of entertainment'. The essays, written over a period of twenty-odd years and disparate in topic and tone, all seek to understand entertainment in its own terms. This means taking seriously the common sense of entertainment, notions like escapism, glamour, fun, stardom and excitement, as well as phrases such as 'it takes your mind off things' and 'it's only entertainment'. It also means analysing given instances of entertainment as entertainment, neither assuming one already understands what this is nor pushing the analysis too quickly on to other things. These are the effects of two other terms that have dominated discussion of entertainment: art and ideology.

The discourses of both art and ideology tend to take the idea of entertainment for granted, and therefore not to scrutinize it. The former either seeks to denigrate entertainment because it is not art (not formally perfect, accomplished or innovative, not emotionally deep, with nothing interesting to say about the world) or tries to show that such-and-such an instance of entertainment is really, or also, art; either way, the issue of what entertainment is is side-stepped. Discussion of ideology on the other hand tends to treat entertainment as a sugar on the pill of ideological messages, either condemning it as a disguise for world views of which the writer disapproves or else commending it as a strategy for promoting those of which she or he does approve. Once again, though, what entertainment is is not addressed. If one uses the terms in a certain way, it is possible to consider all works of entertainment as also always works of art and ideology. They have formal properties and affects and perforce convey world views. In particular, one can try to show, as I do in these essays, how formal properties create, say, the élan of the musical, the allure of stars, the sensuality of disco or the excitement of action movies. However, to analyse entertainments in these terms is to refuse the in fact valuable evaluative connotations of art and ideology and only to consider the way form, affect and world view constitute the enjoyment that an entertainment proposes.

This does not mean that works of entertainment should be immune from ideological criticism. Indeed, one might define the project of these essays as the development of a political engagement with entertainment qua entertainment. This does fly in the face of one of the abiding beliefs of the discourse of entertainment, namely, that it is, after all, only entertainment. However, any entertainment carries assumptions about and attitudes towards the world, even if these are not the point of the thing; and the fact that an entertainment entertains does not let it off the hook of social responsibility, does not make up for sexism, racism or any other deleterious ism.

The task is to identify the ideological implications - good and bad - of entertainment qualities themselves, rather than seeking to uncover hidden ideological meanings behind and separable from the façade of entertainment. Thus in pointing, say, to the celebration of female energy and mastery of the world in The Sound of Music, I hope I have not just identified this as a politically welcome bonus alongside the lovely numbers but rather have shown it in what makes the numbers lovely: the force of Julie Andrews' delivery, the lilting drive of the tunes, the use of editing to display taking possession of the world. What I do not say in the essay on The Sound of Music, but do in 'The colour of entertainment' and in relation to Speed, is that the very trope of mastery of the world - that gorgeous sense of sung, danced or 'actioned' expansion in space - also has negative ideological implications. The musical is unusual in assigning the experience of expansion to female characters, whereas Speed and action films generally are much more traditional in their gender division of entertainment labour; both however are part of a celebratory spreading out into and controlling of the world which has distinct racial and ecological implications. It is the feeling form of imperialism and the destruction of the planet. It is on such feelings and forms, the ends of entertainment, that ideological criticism focuses here rather than the ends to which entertainment may be put.

The topics discussed in these essays - which, if not exactly serendipitous, were certainly, and obviously, not chosen as part of a programme of research - are kinds of entertainment that few would dispute belong in the cultural category of entertainment: musicals, action movies, glamour stars, pinups, porn, dance music. Three depart slightly from this. Both ballet and the classic television serial are probably more readily perceived as belonging in the category art rather than entertainment. My polemical intent with these brief pieces (and the references to the news as entertainment in 'Entertainment and utopia') is to unsettle the assumption that things that enjoy high cultural prestige are not in fact informed by the same entertainment values as those that are not - perhaps the former are just entertainment for highbrows. The other exception is the article on the trope of serial killing in, mainly, film and television. Here I have deliberately stressed both the formal enjoyments deployed in serial killing fictions (and by implication reportage), alongside the more usual address to its social significance, and also the moral and social significance of those enjoyments.