Oh, puppies, why do you live?

So farewell then, Top Of The Pops. A pillar of pop music has been demolished, and you, my dear non-viewer, are holding the sledgehammer.

Following on from my last post about the show, I watched the final edition last night with the same morbid fascination as if a puppy was being beaten to death with a lead pipe in front of crying children. (I watched the last episode of Dynasty for similar reasons.)

>Potch

The swansong of TOTP amounted to a hotch potch of dusty archive footage peppered with old presenters trying to be funny. There wasn't a live performance to be seen. So we were treated to the Rolling Stones. On video. The Spice Girls. On video. The Jackson Five, Beyonce, Wham's hair. On video. If I wanted this crap, I would have tuned into VH1. Or beaten a puppy to death; both have about the same entertainment value.

I am in favour of TOTP being killed off. The future of TV is X Factor and Big Brother. Let us leave this medium to the teenyboppers and abandon our tellyboxes to gather dust in the shed, while we implant YouTube microchips into our eyelids and surf into the i-sunset.

>Best

Having said that, I can't resist declaring a two second silence in memory of Top Of The Pop's best moments:

1. The Timelords and Doctrin' The Tardis, complete with special visual rave effects - see the video here;
2. Opus 3's It's A Fine Day, complete with mysterious balls, later sampled by Orbital for Halcyon;
3. The Orb's truncated Blue Room, complete with chess set - see the video here [link broken];
4. Digital Orgasm playing Running Out Of Time, complete with even more special visual rave effects (performing as Digital because 'orgasm' is a grown-up word).

Also, spare another minute's silence for the greatest rhyming couplet ever to be uttered on the TOTP stage: "I messed my pants when we flew over France."

>Knapsack

And so we go a-wandering, an I-Pod in our knapsack, valderi, valdera, into the unknown world of new teknolijies. One day we will try and think of the name of that TV show where Tim Kash was crap and McFly were great. Top Of The... um... something, I forget.

Of course, there will be more casualties, more puppies to kill. Next on the digital chopping block will be MTV, who seem to have forgotten there is a revolution going on, and strangely have very little actual music on their actual main station despite the actual M in their moniker.