Midweeks come to Radio One

At the risk of sounding like some actor pretending to be a PC user, we did suggest a few years back that sharing the midweek charts properly might be a way to try and make the charts a bit more interesting for the average person.

At the risk of sounding like a contrary sod, now they're actually going to do it, I think it's probably come way, way too late to actually turn round interest in the best selling singles.

Oh, yes, there were a lot of people exercised about the battle between McElderly and Rage Against The Machine back at Christmas - when Sony turned against Sony - but of those people so exercised, how many could even tell you what's number one this week? Even Joe lost interest once Boxing Day came around. He doesn't even know his record eventually made it to number one. Nobody from his team has bothered to check.

There's a characteristically odd piece of writing from MediaGuardian to welcome plans for Radio One to broadcast the chart:

BBC Radio 1 is to break with more than 40 years of tradition by broadcasting a midweek chart rundown for the first time.

Eh? But for the first couple of decades, the midweek chart rundown was the chart - certainly until the mid 1980s, there wasn't really much opportunity for there to be a half-way chart because it was too slow and expensive to compile the chart proper without giving it a couple of days for numbers to be collected, collated and crunched. So, yes, it is something they haven't done before; and, yes, they could have been doing it for a few years now. But breaking a 40 year tradition? That's a bit over the top.