TOTP favourites Slade. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
One of the great things about our super-atomised, digital age is that, not only is it much easier to find good music, it's also easier to avoid the bad.
By clicking links on blogs like this and trawling through The Hype Machine I've heard loads of new stuff without ever being at any risk of stumbling across Nickelback or Leona Lewis.
At the beginning of the pop age, it was different. If you wanted to listen to Great Balls Of Fire without actually buying it you were quite possibly going to have to listen to every other big single that was released that month until the DJ finally decided to stick it on; sometime after Bernard Bresslaw's Mad Passionate Love, probably. Actually, that's a great song, isn't it?
Twenty years ago the situation had improved slightly with more specialist radio shows. At least if you wanted to hear Public Enemy there was relatively little chance of stumbling across Morris Minor and the Majors first. Even so, if you wanted to find the pearls, you knew you had to hold your breath and go for a long, dark swim in some sewage-streaked waters.
As a means of discovering new music, the radio has only ever been as good as the person on the decks, which is to say utterly awful on most stations for most of the day. The internet and iPods have liberated us from the tyranny of the DJ.
The only problem with our current, made-to-measure media paradise is that it turns the "mainstream" into just one of millions of niches to choose from. If you don't have a job where you're allowed (or forced) to listen to daytime radio it's easy to feel like you're missing out on the songs that represent the real spirit of 2008, for better and for worse.
My mental image of the 70s is largely formed of footage of Slade, the Sweet and Suzy Quatro. When they screen I Remember the Noughties! am I going to be the only person going, "nope, I don't remember any of that"?
What we need is a half hour programme where an appointed representative of the mainstream, perhaps a Radio One DJ on sabbatical, introduces a handful of the most popular songs across all genres that week. Then everybody who's too old, too young, too cool, or too uncool to just stumble across the latest big sounds can get their fix in one easy earful.
Yes. Exactly. it's time to bring back Top Of The Pops. It might mean that millions more people are exposed to Nickelback, but that (absurd as it might sound) is a price worth paying. Popular music is about more than just the songs we happen to like. It's the story of our age told via the medium of the ridiculous outfit and the repetitive chorus. Right now it seems like we're missing a major chapter.
