91Èȱ¬

Then, on the 28th of October this year, the . A spokesman said: "This year it was felt that pop music would be better represented over Christmas by an eight-part series of TOTP2 that will reflect some of the year's key hits and possibly the Christmas Number One."

This did not sit well with , who (possibly jokily) said this, a mere two days later: "If the 91Èȱ¬ wanted to do a deal, and I can get ITV to buy it and broadcast it, I'd put it on ITV."

And now, just 20 days after THAT, the 91Èȱ¬ has announced that there now WILL be a TOTP Christmas Special after all. Actually, there will be TWO of them! One on Christmas Day and one on New Year's Eve. And they will be hosted by Fearne Cotton and Reggie Yates. Which is only right and proper.

that she does not believe that this will lead to a full TOTP revival. She said: "I think the people who have always loved TOTP are always going to want it to come back, but I don't think it will. The music industry is so different these days. The chart is so different - Reg (Yates) and I doing the Chart Show are both very aware of how it's changed over the years."

So, suddenly, after two years of consigning TOTP to the dusty attic of TV history, the 'brand' is being talked about again, and people seem to want a bit of Toppy in their lives, but not too much. Nor does anyone believe that ANY music TV show can have the cultural impact of Top of the Pops in its '70s heyday.

But is there a place for a show LIKE Top of the Pops in the late 2000s? Well, that's an interesting question.

I've met some of the people who were involved in the cancellation of the show, and they're all basically in agreement that it was dying and needed to be put out of its misery (the website was going great guns, by the way!). Audience figures were dwindling, a half-hearted redesign hadn't helped and the move to Sundays on 91Èȱ¬2 didn't suddenly turn the show's fortunes around (which is hardly shocking news).

Also, people just kept saying that the charts were becoming more and more irrelevant, what with downloads and all.

Now, the "what with downloads and all" argument is kind of weird, given that the introduction of downloads to the singles chart didn't happen until after the show was cancelled and has done nothing but improve the way songs move around the chart.

Still, it's true that people don't really care whether a song is at No.2 or at No.12 once the chart has been broadcast on Radio 1, published across the web, put in newspapers and so on. Which means that a television show which is entirely based on a countdown towards the No.1 spot which happened a few days previously, is going to be as archaic as a Flat Eric puppet (ask your ravey older cousins).

Then again, saying that TOTP is a show about the charts is like saying that Top Gear is a show about cars. When it was still running, TOTP was a show which showcased the most notable things going on in music in a seven day period, with very little in the way of editorial slant. It was up to the audience to decide who was good and who was bad.

It would be wrong to say TOTP had NO editorial slant, but then, as a mainstream television show aimed at a family audience, that's only to be expected. But broadly speaking, if they were on the show, TOTP loved them. The end.

What was (and is) genuinely exciting about the show was that you could see performances from the people whose songs had been bought by the most people in that week, all together at the same time. Metallica could sit happily next to S Club 7, Eminem could appear next to the latest X-Factor winner, and it would be fine, because that's Top Of The Pops.

Later With Jools Holland, by comparison, is a cherry-picked programme, made up of a certain type of act who can perform live with no frills. They also shine a light into dark corners, showcasing musicians that would otherwise be ignored. Neither of these things are very TOTP, and that's why the two shows complimented each other rather well.

Pretty much every other music show you could care to name picks the acts which suit a certain demographic of audience, which is strange, because if there is one thing mp3 players and playlists have allowed people to finally admit, it's that we all like a massive variety of music, and we love to bash radically different songs against each other, to see what happens.

This simple idea is not represented on television any more.

And in an era where every light entertainment programme has to have some kind of exclusive interactive element, it seems easy to mock TOTP's quaint reliance on a sales chart. But is there any real difference between totting up the amount of times a song has been purchased and counting X-Factor votes? And what if we factored in the amount of times a song has been listened to on MySpace, or YouTube?

It really doesn't matter what the measuring device is, what matters is that every week (or fortnight, or at worst, month) a flag is hammered into the ground, and a TV show is made which represents the very NOWNESS of popular song. It would be partly a shared celebration between the artist and their fans, and partly a source of family arguments as to who is good and who is not good.

That seems to me to be a decent concept for a TV show. It doesn't have to be edgy or boring or cool or bland or sarcastic or nicey-nice or mean-spirited or witless or smartarsey, it just has to get the acts on, let them do their thing, and end with a climax of sorts. Easy!

Look, this was (to my mind) the last great TOTP performance. Isn't it brilliant?

Top of the Pops is still available in website form...