JUST BECAUSE AN IDEA'S FLOPPED IN THE PAST DOESN'T MEAN IT WON'T BE ALLOWED TO FLOP AGAIN

One of the benefits of getting older - besides people actually treating you politely in hotel lobbies - is that you get to experience supposedly rare events repeatedly occuring. Like ITV pondering if it really ought to have its own answer to Top of the Pops. It was a rubbish idea back when the Pops was at the top of its powers - as various attempts, most notably The Roxy demonstrated; but that isn't stopping ITV flying a corporate flag and entering into talks with Chris Cowey's company for a new show:

"Music television has become one of those things that it's easy to make badly. I want to do for music television what the Premier League did for football," said Mr Cowey, who spent six years in charge of Top of the Pops from 1997. "Top of the Pops seems to have been abandoned. Maybe it has got too much baggage. They seem determined to treat music as an offshoot of light entertainment rather than a genre in its own right."

What exactly does he mean by "doing for music television what the Premier League did for football" - push it away onto a subscription ghetto, make the economics so insane that people who supported for years become priced out of the event, over reward a few top -line acts at the expense of the smaller groups thereby creating a stagnant experience where the same four or five names dominate while the rest struggle to keep afloat? Or simply bring in a couple of new camera angles? At the same time, of course, as relying more and more on expensive foreign talent which comes to dominate the scene leaving the national side incapable of competing at interntaional level?

music tv top of the pops