The recent announcement that long-time classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird will be followed up with a sequel follows an all-too-familiar pattern in the worlds of books, film and television where artistic integrity is increasingly being compromised by the want to make easy profits. More books are being churned out or re-cast as badly-made films; movies are re-branded as never-ending series, and telly story-lines are drawn out, all at the expense of originality and quality.

Movie awards will inevitably praise the previous year as a good one for film, but cinematic revenues can distort the real measurement of artistic success. In reality, most of what we see today is needless sequels and unnecessary reboots. The transformation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s short Hobbit tale into a trilogy is just one example. Soon Sony and Marvel will try their hand at the third Spider-Man re-make within a decade. Going from good to bad to ugly, the silence following The Hangover’s third instalment says it all.

With television, Two and a Half Men offers the best, or worst, example of business dining out on big brands to the detriment of the art. Initially it was Charlie Sheen who starred and helped establish the show; seasons later when Sheen went his own way, Aston Kutcher took over but the show’s dynamic remained largely unchanged. Rather than calling it quits, the show limped on before it was inevitably cancelled: a lesson on the importance of leaving your audience wanting more, but knowing, too, that sometimes less is best.

Like all these art forms, political parties born out of ideas and narratives have often lost their sense of direction having compromised this for short-term gains. Knee-jerk policy stances on immigration and flip-flopping over European Union membership are two examples in contemporary UK politics. Opinion polls, book reviews, movie rankings and TV ratings may rise and fall, and trends will come and go, but integrity and quality should guide us, not easy profits. Classics are judged classics for a reason; maybe they are best left alone.