It's Thursday, it's seven o'clock & it's... oh, axed.

Top of the Pops axed. You'd expect me to pass a tear at this sad news, but then again... no (to quote Elton). Unfortunately, it's about time, because the way TOTP is at the moment, it's like looking at a lame dog struggling to crawl up the stairs every Sunday. It needs putting out of it's misery. No good putting a nice shiny collar on it and then shutting it in the back yard for no one to see... ahem. Enough canine comparisons. Let us go on.

It's a cliche to say that TOTP hasn't been any good for ages. Let's face it, everybody has said it at some point in the last 30 years, because the memory cheats - TOTP has always been good & crap, usually in the same edition, because it reflects the charts. For every Jam there's a Lena Martell, for every All Saints there's a Ricky Martin, for every Roxy Music there's Mud. But the cliche is actually now correct. It's a shambles.

For people of a certain age, or old bastards as they are known, the 70s era of Top Of The Pops featuring the likes of Slade, Noel Edmonds, Bowie ("who's that poof with the make up?" says yer Dad) & Pans People is firmly fixed in their minds as the classic years. I was a bit too young to appreciate all this, coming in at the arse end of punk, and whilst watching clips of the lovely Babs, Cherry Gillespie & co frug their way through Gilbert O'Sullivan songs has some appeal to me now ("Phwoor"), it's two eras that have it for me.

1983 to 1990 (or the classic "Now That's What I Call Music" years) is the golden age for me. Okay, there was a lot of shite on, but wasn't that always the case? From New Romantics through Live Aid Rock via Pete Waterman Pop to House & Baggy - these were the years where you'd go into school on the Friday morning and talk about such topics as Howard Jones' daft mate & his mental chains, Frankie's "Two Tribes", Kylie going round Sydney in her open top limo, Madonna's pink wig, the new Duran video, Marti Pellow's shit-eating grin, Sabrina's gravity defying breasts (pictured left) and how George Michael can't be a poof, look at his girlfriend.

And that's the key point - it was firmly entrenched as Thursday night entertainment, stuck before Eastenders or Tomorrow's World. Things started to go wrong in the 90s, when tinkering with the format started happening. The early 90s were a bit dodgy for TOTP, experimenting with live vocals during an era of faceless dance music, and having too many MOR artists appearing, making the show more like Pebble Mill at times. The show really needed a kick up the arse, and got it when producer Ric Blaxhill took over the reins of the show, coinciding with the rise of Britpop. This was my second favorite era: from 1993 to around 1997, every week there would be something great - Bjork, Pulp, Take That, Spice Girls, Kylie, Oasis v Blur, guest presenters like Vic & Bob, Damon, Kylie, Jack Dee - there was still something to talk about the next day at work. I've still got many of these shows on luddite VHS and they're great. There were "exclusive" performances but the basic format of the chart was adhered to.

However, ITV's Emmerdale was starting to beat TOTP in the ratings in the Thursday slot. So the BBC sneakily moved the show to Fridays during certain sporting events and left it there... opposite Coronation Street, in a move which was reminiscent of what they did to Doctor Who in the 80s (but that's another story). Whilst the quality of the show stayed more or less the same (as ever, dependent on who was in the chart at that time), who was watching it? Everybody I knew watched the antics of the residents of Weatherfield, or was too busy getting ready to go out. Families would be split now, between the soap or the tunes. "But there's a late Saturday repeat" says Mr BBC Press Office - yeah, only good to insomniacs or people staggering in from a nightclub with a kebab and a wee nightcap. And don't get me started on TOTP2.

So it struggled on into the 21st century... but wait! Hurrah! Help is at hand! In a genius move, the Beeb brought ex-Ed The Duck-fister Andi Peters (below) in from his dumbing down of the youth department at Channel 4 to overhaul the show, and he fucked it well and truly up with imbecile presenters, magazine type articles ("Hi, I'm Cheryl Tweedy & this is us, Girls Aloud in our hotel, in Japan exclusively for TOTP" - cheers), a rundown of the album chart (why??) and criminally, no actual records from the chart, just "exclusives". It was as if they wanted it to fail. And fail it did, Peters jumping the sinking ship back to presenting, his job done, and the show being eventually shunted into the background like some embarrassing incontinent relative, over to BBC2 on a Sunday. Yeah, cos music shows have always done well on a Sunday. Dickheads. Plus they show clips from old editions of TOTP just to add insult to injury, to avoid having to have too many bands on (expensive) and in this process avoid compiling new TOTP2 shows. It's now trying to be all things to all people yet satisfying nobody. Unless you're a Fearne Cotton fan.

The decline is nothing to do with the changing formats for music. "Downloads are all the rage"- nim nim nyur, crap: CDs replaced vinyl, MP3s replace CDs, life goes on, it's still music. "But there's plenty of other outlets for music such as the channels on SKY which serve the viewer better" they say. Yeah right - the same 20 videos shown over and over covered with text messages and replaced by phone in quiz shows during the night. On every channel. I'd also hardly call "Later With Jools Holland" an adequate substitute. The moment the BBC moved away from the fundamentally simple concept of TOTP - that is, you release a single, if it gets in the Top 40 you'll probably have a chance to be on the show, you drop down the charts, you don't - is the moment that the show began to go off the rails. Putting the show on at a time when it has no chance of a major audience share was the death knell. Moving to BBC2 on a Sunday was more or less the last rites being given. All the programme needed was some TLC (no, not the group).

Bizarrely, the BBC say TOTP2 & the magazine will live on, as will the foreign versions of the show. Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys (who worked for Smash Hits, also sadly gone this year) said this on the subject: "We've felt that the BBC have gradually run down the show since the mid-90s, not trusting the chart-based format, moving it from its classic Thursday evening slot on BBC1 until it ended up on BBC2 with inevitably smaller viewing figures. 'Top Of The Pops' is a world-famous name in music television and it's a shame to see it disappear. Actually, it's worse than a shame, it's a mistake."

You can only hope that they're on the last edition. The only good thing I've seen recently is PSB doing "I'm With Stupid" on the show, with dancers in Blair & Bush masks (pictured). It would be fitting to have something decent on it... like the old days.

Shit. I've become a person of a certain age.