Nostalgia is often seen as a positive emotion, but the word actually derives from the Greek nostos, meaning ‘homecoming’, and algos, meaning ‘pain’. Nostalgia is really a type of homesickness, an ache for something lost. As audiences watch the new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter television series, the algos may hit pretty hard: those tantalising two minutes are the reminder we need that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice. 

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The first thing you notice is simply how bad everything looks. Shows seem to have an obsession nowadays with making everything as dark as possible, so that you are constantly trying to adjust the light settings of your screen to see what’s actually happening. Even the colours of the recent Wicked films – an emerald-saturated dreamland that changed the possibilities of film forever – are as dull and dreary as dishwater.  

The colour grading of Harry Potter the television series looks similarly awful. Everything looks sterile, washed-out, muted, as if we are watching a depressing crime documentary. Where is the colour, the whimsy, the........

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