I’m all for the return of Top of the Pops and TOTP2, and I don’t really think they should have disappeared in the first place. There are very few decent music programs on TV as it is, I’m pretty sure the Beeb could have adapted Top of the Pops to remain mainstream if they’d really wanted to.

Of course, they didn’t, and then they announced it wouldn’t even be back for a Christmas special. As soon as Simon Cowell poked his head above the parapet and said he’d sort it out, they decided perhaps they would like to stage the show after all.

The schedules showed one Top of the Pops special on Christmas Day and one on New Year’s Eve. I don’t know about anyone else but I watched both and essentially saw the same show twice. I thought the BBC were trying to step away from their image of fooling the public, and this doesn’t seem like a good way of doing it. Changing some of the links to introduce the same acts doing the same songs, in some cases the exact same footage from the previous show, isn’t really honouring my intelligence, is it?

Skipping everything I’d already seen on the second show meant I could only enjoy about three minutes of the program. What a waste of time.

Also, are there only a few singers who can do live anymore? I must have seen Sam Sparrow and Duffy at least a dozen times over the festive period.