Even Jim can't fix it this time ... Jimmy
Savile in the Top of the Pops studio.
Photograph: PA
The demise of Top of the Pops, swiftly following that of Smash Hits, means that two citadels of pop have crumbled within months. To lose one may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both says that teenagers have other ways of consuming music now, and TOTP had become just one of many media competing for their love.
Most of those mourning its demise today aren't regular viewers, but adults who haven't see it in at least a decade, and haven't witnessed its prolonged decline into irrelevance. The young target audience - the one million or so who still watch - will have distinctly different memories of the show.
They can't remember a time when TOTP wasn't just the biggest music show on the box but the only one. They weren't around to hear the youth of the 70s and 80s (the very ones eulogising it today) whingeing about its safeness. It was so derided, partly for requiring bands to mime, that it was a byword for naffness, and bolshier types like the Clash refused to be on it. Its perceived predictability was the springboard for Channel 4's groundbreaking pop show The Tube, though TOTP had the last laugh, outliving The Tube by 20 years.
Today's viewers probably regard it simply as a way of passing time between downloading stuff from iTunes and watching MTV Base or the other slam-bang music channels that have sprung up in the last 10 years. No sentimental retelling for them of the old story about Dexy's Midnight Runners playing Jackie Wilson Said in front of a backdrop of darts player Jocky Wilson.
Furthermore, today's pubescents have no dribbling recollections of Pan's People, the literal-minded dance troupe who acted out songs as artists sang them.
But that's their loss. Naff or not, TOTP provided the rest of us with lasting memories. My definitive one is being newly arrived in London and watching it for the first time, when Wham! were on doing their first hit, Young Guns. They wore espadrilles without socks, a fashion revelation to me.
Can you Vultures beat the espadrilles with your own memories?
