My earliest memory of Top of the Pops is having a placatory card game of Pelmanism at the Formica-topped kitchen table with my deeply disquieted granny while my teenage siblings mewled and squawked in the next room over a fantastically sexy, insolent and monochrome Mick Jagger.
"It'll never last," muttered granny, savagely scooping up another pair of jacks and waiting for Tolka Row to start.
How wrong she was. It took 42 years to kill the beast. On Sunday last, the still platinum-haired Jimmy Savile, who had opened the proceedings on the show's first outing in Manchester in 1964, unplugged his cigar to say hello for the last time. Amidst archive footage of hearty girls in mini-skirts ("all right for those London types but they'll never catch on in Wolverhampton," said one alarmed but interested spectator) and Mary Whitehouse in spiky glasses and the throes of indignation, Top of the Pops: the Final Countdown sped through 40 years of music fashion and lamentable haircuts in one nostalgic hour. It was great . . . and awful.
Truly awful to come face to face with pre-boyband boyband Bay City Rollers and realise how shockingly uncool one's (hitherto unrevealed) infatuation with the Edinburgh rockers actually was. (Sadly, the beatific and toothy Derek with the droopy eyes and the yellowing fringe - who in retrospect looked like an abandoned and not terribly bright cocker spaniel - adorned the walls of my box room.) Among the cooler contributors were John Lennon and Yoko Ono (although she was, inexplicably, using a sanitary towel as a blindfold), David Bowie with his dangerous little incisors and spangled jumpsuit, and a malevolent-looking Cher before her nose-job. And among the probably best forgotten, Clive Dunne in a rocking chair and cloth cap warbling Grandad, Baby Spice in platform plimsolls and the Bros oeuvre in its entirety.
Apparently you can't capture a youth audience any longer with "appointment TV". The music industry is no longer negotiating the egg-and-spoon race of the "top 10" and there is no more breathless anticipation as to who will reach the finish line first. The iPod generation has tuned out.
The demise of Top of the Pops has been coming a long time, argued critic Mark Lawson later in the evening on TOTP: The True Story, despite the protestations of disgruntled staff who apparently learned that the show was to be axed when a Guardian journalist rang to ask their reaction. "It's selling ice-cream in winter," Lawson explained. "[The show] is scheduled in a series of less and less comfortable slots until it becomes untenable."
And indeed "end of an era"seemed to be the tenor of the evening, which also included a tribute to Pan's People. An end to polite young dancing girls in baby-doll pyjamas and Tony Blackburn, with his unlikely pigmentation, purring like a jaguar. As Savile popped the cigar back in and turned off the studio lights for the last time, the demise of four decades of music coverage was met only with the cacophony of silence.
"CAN I CALL you Carla?" "I'd prefer if you called me a cab". Reunion, a US drama import concerning the lives and loves of six leggy, pectorally enhanced, white, straight, high-school bosom buddies with matching socks and unlimited access to dermatology, sprang to uncertain life on RTÉ this week. Promising us weeks of predictable plotlines and chip-resistant personalities, Reunion's "hook" is blatantly uncomplicated. As the enthusiastic continuity announcer blurted out prior to the first episode, "one of dem is knocked off".
Following the characters' lives over 20 years of high-school reunions we learn which one, and whodunnit. Carla the reluctant virgin? Matt, the Fulbright scholarship boy and all-round good guy, who takes the rap for Greg (who's weak and rich) after Greg runs a red light and totals some guy and his truck? Greg's girlfriend, Sam, who's pregnant by Matt? Insecure Jenna, who'd throw her leg over a pantomime horse if it sped her to fame, or nerdy Arran (manically desired by Carla), who'd happily be that pony? "Could things get any more complicated?" asked Matt, his cornflower-blue eyes searching for an answer (or maybe it was the catering van). Unhappily, Matt, I suspect they can . . .
This is Ivy League nonsense in pop-socks, St Elmo's Fire in a monsoon or Friends devoid of irony and New York city. Still, if you left your chick-lit beach book on the return flight from Malaga, you should find this bit of dross pleasantly untaxing.
"IT'S ALL IN a good cause! It's all in a good cause! It's all in a good cause!" groaned Derek Mooney, tossing and turning in his rumpled bed as his little wooden Helix tumbled towards Earth. Ahhh, groundhog day! Charity You're A Star is back to torture us, the combined celebrity talent making Bucks Fizz sound like Pavarotti. Couldn't we donate to the various charities if their celebrity representative didn't sing?
The contestants are dire, including former Republic of Ireland footballer John Aldridge, unsuccessfully battling Ring of Fire, and Bryan Murray, who has shrugged off Brookside's paving stones and a financially disastrous dinosaur suit only to re-emerge as a tuneless crooner with the temerity or foolishness to take on Sinatra, plus a bunch of rotund politicians who are attempting to make backbenchers this season's celebrity chefs.
And then there's the panel: Louis Walsh doing a nixer, Linda Martin waving and drowning, and Brendan O'Connor, who must be bored out of his mind with his presumably selfimposed curmudgeonly persona. If you close your eyes and just listen to Charity You're A Star (which is shockingly easy to do), everything takes on an eerie, muffled quality, with its sporadic and alarming cheering, tuneless fragments of half-remembered dirges, and bleary spats. Actually, it's somewhat reminiscent of almost drowning in Butlin's (believe me). Keep very still and quiet, and with a bit of luck it'll all be over after the second chorus. Shhh.
COMEDIAN KEVIN GILDEA, following in the footsteps of his old comedy partner, Ardal O'Hanlon, temporarily hung up the stand-up to become a television tour guide.
Townlands: the Seven Wonders of Westport revealed Gildea to be an engaging, vaguely wistful guide, sleepily trawling through the lovely heritage town in search of his own septet of wonders. Not as Herculean a task as one might think, which is just as well - Gildea, in his rectangular spectacles and floppy shirt, didn't look like he was going to vault over Croagh Patrick.
From Dorinish in Clew Bay, an island formerly owned by John Lennon (which he apparently purchased as a kind of hippie halting site), to the decorous, geranium-clad Georgian houses lining the straightened river that flows through the town centre and once (and probably still) housed the community's merchant princes, Westport and her environs looked stunningly lovely.
Gildea's absurdist humour was gently tickled by Grace O'Malley's biographer, Anne Chambers, as they wandered through the stately Westport House. O'Malley - politician, trader, sailor and pirate - was, as daughter of a chieftain, obliged in her teens to marry for political gain. Her second marriage, however, to "Iron Dick Burke", was her own choice. Iron Dick, Gildea noted with a degree of disappointment, was so called due to an iron foundry on his lands.
Anyway, O'Malley tired of Iron Dick and, much more to Gildea's liking, stood astride Iron Dick's battlements and roared down at the poor chap, who was returning on the horse after a tough day warmongering: "Richard Burke, I dismiss you." She even got to keep the castle, and not a divorce lawyer in sight.
"I wonder if she threw his iron underpants at him over the battlements?" Gildea mused.
Townlands is a gentle, interesting strand, a reminder that you can make home-grown summer television without a telephone vote or a creaking octave in sight.