Rundown

Uniquely to this week’s Telly Addict, I turn the oblong in which my head and shoulders have appeared on a weekly basis since April 2011 into a soap box, and launch a campaign to save Top Of The Pops on BBC4. Hmm? But Top Of The Pops was axed in 2006. I know, but BBC4 have – as connoisseurs of popular cultural history will know – been running unedited editions of the chart show from 1976 and 1977, on a weekly basis, since last April. And now the channel is considering ending what ought to have been a 30-year experiment in real-time Top 30 rebirthing.

You can see why. Savile. DLT. These regular hosts have already been rubbed out of history – the latter, like his Magic FM show, until the matter is “resolved”. But surely this is not reason enough to nix the whole thing? Edmunds, Powell, Stewart, Jensen, Blackburn … these men are not accused of being part of Savile’s ugly shadow world. And nor is the show itself, whatever one hideous, predatory individual might have done within its corridors and dressing rooms. You might just as well erase all footage of shows made at Television Centre while Savile was alive.

Anyway, for this reason, Top Of The Pops is one of the programmes under review this week, along with the return of Peep Show for its eighth series on C4, the brilliant one-off Bradley Wiggins: A Year In Yellow on Sky Atlantic, and the indulgent Stephen Fry: Gadget Man on C4.