Creativity Quote by Neil Tennant

Tennant’s line lands like a shrug from someone who’s spent a career watching pop get flattened into “content.” The word “insane” isn’t precious, it’s pragmatic: musicals are labor-intensive, expensive, and built for repetition. You write them to live - to tour, to be restaged, to gather lore. TV, especially in the broadcast mindset Tennant’s generation grew up with, offered the opposite: a single airing, a vanishing act. The subtext is almost industrial. Why pour months of composition, orchestration, and narrative engineering into something designed to disappear into the schedule?

It’s also a quiet jab at television’s old bargain with art: wide reach in exchange for disposability. Tennant isn’t condemning TV as low culture; he’s diagnosing its incentives. A one-off musical broadcast asks artists to accept an economy of attention where the premiere is the funeral. That’s especially pointed coming from the Pet Shop Boys’ world, where songs are engineered to be replayed, remixed, and recontextualized - club track, radio single, video, live arrangement. Pop thrives on afterlives.

Read in today’s streaming era, the quote gets sharper. “Seen once” now sounds almost quaint, yet the anxiety remains: platforms still reward the new, not the enduring. Tennant’s skepticism is less about medium-snobbery than about permanence. He’s arguing for art that earns its effort by sticking around long enough to matter.