How many of you have memories of dancing around the house to ABBA’s Dancing Queen or humming to ABBA music in Muriel’s Wedding? So many of their songs have been the backdrop to pop culture for years and it was with happiness that I heard that ABBA were going to get together again and release some new material.

This all sounded exciting and a moment to savour in a world that seems too full of doom and gloom. Would the songs be any good was my first thought? Would they tap into a 2021 zeitgeist and have a whole generation of young people dancing around the room and tapping their feet? Too soon to tell.

But the next piece of information rather floored me. They planned to create a concert in London using special effects and replacing themselves with their avatars on stage. A publicity photograph showed them with marker points tagged to their body suits so that as they moved, their actions could be authentically replicated in their individual avatar. This of course had been invented years ago as we saw when the creature Gollum was able to come so vividly alive on the screen in Lord of the Rings. It was just another technological gadgetry to make a cinema experience vivid and lifelike.

However, these avatars would be perpetually young as the band had been back in the day.

So, what is wrong with this picture? I was instantly concerned that this decision was feeding into the ageism that is widespread in our society. Social media and the behemoths of advertising push that we are meant to stay young forever, plastering on face creams, botoxing our wrinkles and whipping our bodies into a frenzy at the gym. The beauty myth goes hand in hand with the myth of timeless youth, the quest to never age.

But if ABBA as a group is capable of writing songs together and singing together, then why not just perform on stage as they are now, with older bodies and life experience etched into their faces? Yes, they don’t look like the fresh- faced beauties they were and that young people perhaps had crushes on, but they are themselves, genuine, older and real.

It seems to be fine for Mick Jagger to strut his stuff around the stage and he is in his 70s. So why not ABBA or is it just a clever marketing gimmick that will be a one off and I am missing the commercial point of that?

But still it rankles, smacking of removing the older versions of ourselves and hiding us away, too ugly and too old to be seen out in public. Were you offended or do you think it's perfectly okay for ABBA to remain as they were in their heyday?