A lost cause

Wailing and gnashing of teeth appear not to have greeted the news that Top of the Pops is to end after 42 glorious years. Indeed, as far as I can see, no one gives a monkey’s. I have to admit, I am disappointed. Of all those newspaper columnists with nothing to write about, you would have thought at least one would have embraced the cause. And where are the elderly pop-pickers hoisting banners outside Television Centre and brandishing tear-stained photos of Jimmy Savile? Instead, public reaction has been muted and resigned, and possibly tempered by surprise that the show was still going on at all. BBC2, did you say? Early Sunday evenings? It is so definitively not the time to be watching pop music on television that we can only assume the schedulers put it there on purpose, to let it expire quietly and away from the public gaze. Every so often I would tune in by mistake, witness the brittle stage-school teens now hosting the show and turn over to something else in a hurry.