So there it is. After 41 years Top of the Pops tonight shuffled out of the mainstream and, as of this Sunday, will reside in the not-so thrilling environs of BBC2’s early evening Sunday schedule. Rock on! For those not in the know, Top of the Pops is the longest running TV music show in the world and for many years was pretty much the only place you could see pop music on British TV. With performances entering Britain’s shared heritage on an almost monthly basis, there’s not a person under the age of 65 who can’t tell you their particular TOTP highlight. Whether it was Morrissey’s hearing-aids, Prodigy overloading the BBC switchboard with the most number of complaints EVER received by the corporation for “Firestarter”, Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Jockey Wilson incident, The Sweet scaring the shit out of a million living rooms or just a flash of knickers from the erstwhile Pans People, it was part of British tea-times (and Christmas Day) for generations. Then they fucked with the format.

First it was moved from Thursday evenings at 7pm to the graveyard of Friday’s at 7:30pm; a slot that put it head to head with Coronation Street and made sure that most of its core audience would be down the park polishing off their second bottle of White Lightening. Secondly, in response to MTV and the slew of other music shows sucking up ratings like a box-fresh sponge, they decided to get kid’s TV presenters in and dilute the band-after-band-after-band-after-band format that had stood it in good stead since the Saville-era; introducing an incoherent mash of videos, live performances and artist/news features. Now we had a couple of waxy robots in distressed denim, gurning into the camera and introducing a “news” section, whilst the actual music became ever more marginalised. It was painful to watch.

Some people will say this is merely rose-tinting the past and Top of the Pops was always a load of bollocks punctuated by brief, but coruscating, performances that went down in popular culture folklore. And, to be fair, they’d be right. But TOTP always straddled the line between outright infuriation/horror and chin dribbling glee to perfection. Recently it just got damn boring.

A good example of its demise was last Friday’s show (July 8th) where, due to the terrorist attacks on London, they were missing two acts (Queens of the Stone Age and Pete Doherty) who hadn’t been able to attend for undisclosed reasons. Rather than use this opportunity to stick a finger up to the wankers who had perpetrated the bombings by showing a classic performance from TOTP’s formidable archive of a quintessential London performance (anything from The Clash would have done), they instead chose to conduct a pitiful ‘video vote’ amongst the audience and then ran Gwen Stefani’s dreadful M.I.A. rip-off. It was embarrassing to watch and indicated just how far it had fallen as a barometer of the nation’s tastes and attitudes. Compare this to the days of John Peel dressed as Henry VIII introducing Tight Fit or even the Brit Pop renaissance enjoyed in the mid-90’s, and you can only conclude that the BBC wanted rid of this scheduling quirk in their primetime slot and set it on a course of self destruction accordingly. Well it worked and I’m quite glad it’s gone; relegated to a new channel and a new format it might just get chance to be great again. But I won’t be holding my breath.