"Popular entertainments of all kinds have been blamed for dragging down public morals in a gathering pattern of accusation which remains essentially the same even though it is attached to radically different forms of amusement : pre-modern feasts and festivals; eighteenth-century theatres and bawdy-houses, mid-nineteenth-century penny gaffs; the Music Halls of the “Gay” Nineties ; the first flickering danger-signs from the silent movies ; the Hollywood picture palaces between the wars ; and television viewing in our own historical time. Each, in its own time, has been accused of encouraging a moral debauch; each has been said to encourage imitative crime among the young."