From this week, Radio 1 began to count down the chart at 4.30, giving two-and-a-half hours to the best-sellers list. It was enough to play every record in the top 40, albeit with some fairly brutal edits of records sliding down the list. Prior to this week, the chart had only begun at 5pm. The 150-minute arrangement lasted only 62 weeks, the start was pushed back to 4pm from 16 March 1992, where it has remained ever since. The concept of playing every record in the top 40 was abolished in 2003. This commentary also brings in occasional details from the Scottish Top 40: at this time, Tom Ferrie's show aired on Radio Scotland at 10.10 on Friday evenings, and was made by Network Chart compilers MRIB from sales in their Scottish panel from Friday to Thursday.

From the file labelled "never a hit, though they did try" comes Silje Nergaard. The Norwegian jazz vocalist used her pitch-perfect voice on Tell me where you're going, enlisted Pat Metheny to provide the backing band, and ... nothing. Not a flicker. OK, a move from 60-55 (and number 38 in the Scottish chart) did beat the song's first release the previous spring, when it had stalled just outside the top 75, but this was top weight for her one and only hit. Not that this has stopped Silje (that's pronounced Celia) from using her silky vocal talents to great effect at jazz concerts around the world.

(More: (and there's a lot more) Red Hot and Blue, Orchestra on the Half Shell, Gazza, New Kids on the Block, Cliff Richard (and Chris Eaton), Status Quo, Bill Medley, medley hits, The Farm, and this lot. And that's only the 1990 hangovers!)

1991 began, though, with one of the most bizarre records ever to be a number one single. Iron Maiden had first had a hit single in early 1980, and slowly but surely cemented their place in the new wave of British metal; 1982's Run to the hills began a run of 31 top 20 hits from 34 releases, and since 1988 the band's had sixteen top ten hits. They've survived line-up changes, including the change of lead singer that killed Genesis stone dead. The number one single, Bring your daughter... to the slaughter annoyed many people for its complete cynicism. Five formats - a 12-inch picture disk, one-sided 7-inch, two-sided 7-inch, 12-inch with calendar, and cassette single with otherwise-unavailable artwork - made each item a collectable for the group's fans, and ensured the group could bank on 40,000 first-week sales. Even if the song is released on christmas eve, a notoriously slow week for sales.

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An open letter to this blog's MP.

Dear Mr. Potter,

As you may be aware, Dr. Harris has propsed an amendment to remove the blasphemy laws from the statute book. I seek your support for this amendment, for the following reasons:

* The blasphemy law acts to protect certain Christian beliefs and makes it illegal to question or deny them. Such a proscription runs contrary to the principle of free speech.

* The blasphemy law protects beliefs, not people. It is entirely right for society to seek to protect individuals and groups from hatred and attack. It is quite wrong to extend the law to protect propositions, creeds, and superstitions.

* The blasphemy law is an uncertain law, and hence a bad law. Given the very limited number of cases, it is impossible to predict how the courts might interpret the law in any putative case. This is contrary to the principles of good law, and unacceptable in practice. Furthermore, the blasphemy law lacks credibility; any law that is only enforced sporadically, at intervals of many years, becomes an indefensible lottery.

* The blasphemy law defends only the teachnigs of the Church of England, which is unacceptable in a society characterised by its diversity of beliefs. Such unequal treatment naturally arouses resentment and demands for the privilege to be extended to other groups. The most fair and equal solution would be to abolish the laws.

Yours constituencially,
The Snow in the Summer or So-So

More: Abolish blasphemy laws from the British Humanist Association; most content shamelessly recycled from Mat GB.

A practical reason why should the blasphemy laws be repealed? Here's a pertinent example. Cool kid posts picture of christianity's Mr. Jesus as the walking undead, gets flamed for conflating resurrected in the anglican mythos with zombie in the hollyfordland theology. If Mr. Vorpal were posting in the UK, he would be subject to censorship by screeches of blasphemy. As ever, the Canadians have struck the right balance.

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Mr. Pokery points us towards the Moron Football League, a game similar to NCAA-ball, but played by university graduates. That's except for the Hawaii team, which is entirely populated by high-school pupils, because they know more than graduates.

But it's his musing that the MFL might work as internet television that is of interest. We tried watching Quarterlife, the non-canon sequel to My So-Called Life, when it first came onto the web last year. We gave up after about three episodes, because the video quality was so low that the seven-minute episodes were making us queasy. It would have helped tremendously if the picture hadn't been occupying the majority of the screen, and could be re-sized into a satisfactorily small box.

Sports broadcasting requires high-quality video to catch the fine detail of the action, but consuming little enough bandwidth to allow all to see it. The idea's probably a goer, if and only if one has a fairly broad connection. How broad? HDTV over MPEG4 requires about 7 Mbps; poor quality DTTV broadcasts get away with about 4Mbps. We reckon it would be possible to have a live full-screen view of a sports match on a 6 Mbps broadband connection; a quarter-screen view would be possible in 2Mbps. (Highlights are a different matter: they can be locally buffered and more carefully compressed, and there's no reason why a full-screen display shouldn't be available to all.)

Would MFL be the compelling proposition to persuade people to pay for internet rights? No, not when the whole alphabet from X to A has failed to persuade people to part with their hard-earned dough. The Quarterlife experiment is more likely to succeed first, though not on the first iteration.

We may have been a bit late on the blasphemy vote, which was lost by 2:1 and won't return this side of the 2010 election, but we are in time for this one. DAB station Core will close tomorrow, 11 January, after eight years and a few months on air. A station playing nothing more than pop music was a fantastic idea, and its failure is a tribute to GWR's remarkable inability to organise a party in a brewery. Bowing to the inevitable, Oneword also closes on Saturday. And GWR's station for children, Fun Radio, has been pulled from DAB outside London; it continues to broadcast, at least for now, on cable and from Astra II.

And a latest score: Real Madrid Two, Surreal Madrid Fish. We ran that score through the Upset-o-meter, which whirred and clanked and gave it an upset rating of Kelp. Better than the Krill of Cardiff beating Chasetown, but somewhat less than the shock of Toulouse losing to the fourth-division Boulevard Periphique, a shock there of M25 proportions. (Continued down The Burkiss Way.)

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This week's entry in the book review column is The Beano Book 2008.

We had lots of snow yesterday, the huge, sleety snowflakes like these in St. John's. Sheltered from the wind, they looked magnificent, fluttering down ahead of the street-light. Walking into the wind, a whole lot less fun.

Particularly good wishes to The Beef.

News

The level of fast-food litter is rising by a third each year, claims an anti-litter lobby group in Ireland. Actually, they don't mean that in the slightest, they don't mean that discarded burger boxes and chip wrappers are magically levitating off the ground by 1/3 of their height compared to last year. No, the lobbyists mean that the number of items is increasing by about 30%.

We've completely lost count of the number of times the Third Rebuilding of Neustraßebahnhof has gone back to the drawing board. This time, they're looking for a first-class design. Can't they just re-use the plans for Berlin's new Hauptbahnhof? Or just borrow the idea from St. Pancras?

Iain MacWhirter suggests that the United bit of the United Kingdom is unravelling. Only Labour in England seems to be dragging its feet over a federal constitutional settlement, probably because it knows that the concept of England as distinct from the UK is nebulous. We still reckon that England is too large an area to hold together, and that the return of Wessex, Mercia, West-pennine, Yorkshire and Northumbria, Anglia, and Greater Sussex is inevitable. Probably also the city-state of London.

There may be one or two readers who were expecting us to provide pillar-to-post coverage of the mock elections taking place in some parts of North America. We don't propose to give any coverage to this non-event, as we are unable to recognise the claims of independence made by these colonies, territories, possessions, purchases, conquests, and other acquisitions. In the absence of a fully-observed agreement to the contrary, they remain a de facto part of the United Kingdom. Covering these plebiscites would give succor to the traitors against King and Country, and further embolden their terrorist plots.

Crooked Timber dissects another count of violent deaths in Iraq. The headline figure is 151,000 violent deaths by June 2006, a 95% confidence range of 104,000 to 223,000. The upper end of this range is compatible with a previous study (Lancet, 2006) which indicated 655,000 excess deaths to the end of 2005, when we remember that all violent deaths are excess, but not all excess are violent.

We don't claim to know which is the more reliable survey. What we do know is that the efforts of scientific illiterates such as Mrs. Beckett to pour scorn on the Lancet paper purely because it was inconvenient remain the ramblings of someone who was promoted far beyond her capabilities. And we find it very hard to celebrate 151,000 dead people, even if we had (and, to some extent, still have) suspicions that the toll was four times that number. More: Sceptic Isle.

Dominic Lawson explains why Mr. The Soup Dragon is calling for wage restraint: it's because Soupy borrowed too much blue string when supplies were good, and now that there's less blue string around, his henchman Alistair Chancellor is suddenly finding things very difficult.

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Media Notwork

In the UK, BFBS (yes, the army station) has taken over Core's place on Digital1. Highlights include Frank McCarthy at 6pm Monday, playing the top 40. In full. With no chat, no gimmicks, just the tunes. Apparently, Radio 1 will continue to play some of the records on Sunday evening, but this becomes the definitive countdown. That schedule in full.

Anyway, Radio Rabbit has a note on the final hour, the whatever-happened-to, and the last ten songs.

M. Popup is a stingy philanderer who is unfit for public office, according to his ancien-wife Cécilia. He's also a dunderhead who has decided to swing his axe over the English-language service of France 24. His replacement, France Monde, will broadcast exclusively in French. It's a foolish move, as F24 was beginning to make a mark on the world of news channels. The Russians, Merkins, and Chinese all have their own national propaganda channels, it could be argued that the UK does as well, why not France?

How will this new channel differ from the existing francophone channel TV5? Two ways: TV5 takes its news from throughout the francophone world, playing entire bulletins from Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, and Africa. And we don't think FMTV will ever show Fort Boyard or concerts featuring Vanessa Paradis and Amy MacDonald. It looks like the only independent television news voice will remain al-Jazeera. That said, the foreign and culture ministers have voiced their opposition to the plans, so there may yet be a bit of sense. At any rate, Jonathan Marks reckons the idea is plain stupid, and we're inclined to agree with him.

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The Arts

For chess fans: the shortest stalemates yet constructed.

Why do critics still sneer at science fiction? asks Sam Jordison in Okobs Grauniad. The first comments sum it up: sci-fi has such forgotten ideas as plot and characterisation, and the critics sneer at everything. Utimately, it's because the anglosphere tends not to do depth - we found Camera Man, an hour-long play on culture network Radio 3 - to be unfulfilling because it was so shallow.

The Archers in 2007. Ooh noooo.

What hearing the works of composers does to children.

Tasmin Little to give away three full pieces on her website. Lines open 14 January.

Sonic Boom Boys. When the venerable rockers' mag Mossy Stone is critical of the quality of recorded music, you know something is badly awry.

Does sponsorship demean television, asks Gareth McLean in Het Grauniad. Of course it does, anything connected to advertisements and direct commercial sponsorship suffers. We have the perfect answer: the mute button, and a book we can dip into and out of in two-minute chunks. Either that, or sticking everything on the hard disk recorder and watching it back, using the fast-forward button to go zzzzzzap! through a full commercial break in about ten seconds.

The threat to proper chocolate. One of the highlights of our occasional trips to Brussels is the chance to get some proper choccies from Neuhaus and Godiva. Not this rubbish from the newcomers.

And now, a word on gravatar.com. Abysmal. It has a speed of response that makes the Royal Mail look like the most efficient organisation on the planet. We don't particularly like the whole idea of having a picture follow a commentator everywhere, as it makes it far too easy for other contributors to ignore a comment based on who is saying it, rather than what it is. At this end, we've put gravatar.com in our adblock list as a complete waste of bandwidth.

Arts Journal warns us about contrived content. It's a press release that has ideas above its station, and someone powerful enough to want to pass it off as news. Think of every plug for Panorama, only less obvious.

And finally, quote of the week. Every time you listen to the Beatles or the Who, it is as if, in 1970, you were listening to folks from 1932 dressing like a flapper.

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The Artful Manager writes about another academic survey into how people consume the arts. Apparently, the world can be split into four segments:

• Inactives - people who don't bother with anything artistic at all
• Univores - people who are interested in popular culture only
• Paucivores - people who consume a limited range of cultural activities
• Omnivores - those who do the lot.

But this rather begs the question: what is high culture? Is it G4 and Katherine Jenkins, marketed as though they were pop stars, and performing mostly modern repertoire? Does it include the Three Tenors, marketed as a stadium gig while performing mostly classical works? What about commercial film; can any collection of still pictures count as high culture? The Nutcracker? Pantomime? A bunch of thirtysomething yuppies prancing about on a school stage in the name of dance?

As we see it, culture ranges from stuff that anyone can understand (for instance, page 3) to concepts that make no sense even to the people who wrote it (eg pretty much everything Schoenberg wrote). Divisions into low, high, intermediate are just as artificial as dividing the human voice into soprano, bass, tenor, sort-of-alto-but-with-bits-of-mezzo.

The best thing one can do is try something new. Don't have to like it, but it is improving to test your limitations. This, of course, is why the splintering of television into 200 channels, each catering to a very narrow comfort zone, is A Bad Thing, and why mixed television channels (C4, BBC4) are cultural necessities.

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New national number ones, and other notes...
Czechia - About you now. Yay!
Germany, where we hear that No Angels will be competing for the Eurovision nomination. What all-female band that re-united in 2007 to cries of it was better first time round might the UK send? The Germans have also got the faux-Spaniards, the Tokio Hotel clones (we tried that last year, look where it got us), and someone from the musicals.
Estonia - Bleeding love.
Latvia - Dima Bilan's in at 5 with Gore-zima, and Apologise leads the way.
Ireland - Piece of me gives Britney Spears a number one, Basshunter storm into the top 3, Munday and Sharon Shannon's Galway girl re-enters the top 10 after seven months on release.

Airplay chart: Scouting for Girls remain at the top, with Adele climbing to 2. Lykie and Booty Love have big climbs, David Jordan and Gwen Stiffeny new entries after being played a lot on Radio 2.

Amongst those making it in below 100 are Céline Dion, whose Eyes on me looks to be a Bit of a Miss. Mary J Blige and Radiohead have download entries, as does Janet Jackson's tribute to Roger Bolton, Feedback. Ringo Starr's theme song to co-European city of culture, Liverpool 8 has sold to all the cultured people in the city, and enters at 99. A song about Stavanger would do better. Hoosiers have a disaster with their third single, Worst case scenario had a full release - physical singles and all - but still only makes 86.

Duffy finally gets into the top 75, albeit by just a place. Failure for the Maccabees, Toothpaste kisses has a full release and still only makes 70. Plain White Ts finally get round to following up their big hit, but Hate (I really don't like you) is only 63. Kelly Rowland puts Work in at 56, and Bodyrox and Luciana have What planet you on at 54. Bad luck to Dave Armstrong, whose Love has gone would be top 40 if Rihanna never released anything; it's 43 on full release.

Stumped by the success of the Wombats? Can't think why; even if they're Moving to New Amsterdam, they've got verve and zip and bundles of energy. It's 37 on downloads alone. Birtney's Pears puts two big ones in the top 40 this week, as Give me more re-enters at 34, an 11-place climb. Out with the birch as British Sea Power land at 31 with Waving flags on its physical release. We've been fans since the first album, even if we did have them confused with the Mull Historical Society until hearing this one. Surprised to recall that they've only had the one top 20 hit, 2005's ...Oily stage.

Lykie Ignoume's got a re-entry at 29, but Wow doesn't lend itself to anagrams. We're going to go zzzzzzzzzap! and tell Reggie to get another job: Radio 1 again refuses to play Amy MacDonald's This is the life, even though it's up 12 to 28, and is the fastest climber not to change its release status. Comes to it when we have to rely on the army station to play the top 40 properly; the show would not be poorer for omitting any one of the three Rihanna fallers, it is poorer for leaving out one of the fastest climbers, even if the performer had enough integrity not to give the chart show producer head. (A rumour we've completely made up, but is more credible than the producer.)

Anywhoo, second-highest new entry goes to Oystar, a man who refused to stick to his contract with his bank, and used a loophole to get a few quid back. I fought the Lloyds is number 25, and (because we're boycotting Radio 1 effective from three positions ago) we've not heard it, but from other commentators' opinions, we may win. Scouting for Girls' oldie has rebounded from 66 to 24 over the festive period. Bored now. Robyn has the fastest climber in the top 75, with a song some of us have been enjoying since last summer. That's June 2006.

The remaining listener to Radio 1 was advised that it's unbelievable that the Sugababes occupy positions 22 and 21. Not really: they're the seventh act to turn that exact trick (though the last was Matt Monro in March 1961) and it's the eighth time someone's done that anywhere in the top 40 since the start of last year. A return period of about seven weeks? Barely remarkable.

Booty Love clamber into the top 20, and Kayne West's Homecoming advances 41-14. The old records are slumping - T2 9-15, Valerie 6-13, and Leona 3-12. Anyone would think they were Cliff Richard christmas singles. Highest new entry to some trash from Lupe Fiasco at 7, remarkable more for being the first proper new entry there since The Feeling's Sewn in March 2006. Rihanna's Don't stop the music is up 6 at 6, and Leon Jackson plunges 1-5. Let's hope he falls like a Cliff Richard christmas single. Nickelback is up 4 at 4, tying the peak of How you remind me from April 2002. Soulja Boy drops a place to 3. Birtney's Pears storms up 17 places to 2, but is still soundly beaten by Basshunter, moving 14-1. He's the eleventh Swedish act to have a number one single.

On the up side, Amy MacDonald has a very large extended family; her album climbs to number 1 this week. Het Grauniad's review from last February - commercially huge but critically reviled - was spot on. Radiohead drop to 2, Scouting for Girls goes 12-4, Plant and Krauss 22-6, and Newton Fakener 13-7. Only entry of significance is Tom Baxter's Skybound at 12. Robyn, Enemy, Wombats, Britney, and someone called Seasick Steve scoot up - the latter's Dog House Music was promoted on Jools' Hootenay programme last year.

10 17 Scouting For Girls - Elvis ain't dead
12  3 Leona Lewis - Burning love
16 10 Alicia Keys - No one
17 15 Cascada - What hurts the most
18 20 Mika - Relax take it easy
20 11 Hoosiers - Goodbye Mr. A
21 13 Sugababes - About you now
22 16 Sugababes - Change
23 55 Robyn - Be mine
24 33 Scouting for Girls - She's so lovely
28 40 Amy MacDonald - This is the life
31 NE British Sea Power - Waving flags
32 28 Bloc Party - Flux
37 NE Wombats - Moving to New Amsterdam
39 39 Mika - Happy ending
44 25 Hoosiers - Worried about Ray
47 47 Freemasons - Uninvited
49 46 Robyn - With every heartbeat
52 54 Filo and Peri - Anthem
55 35 Mika - Grace Kelly
63 NE Plain White Ts - Hate
64 30 White Stripes - Conquest
70 NE Maccabees - Toothpaste kisses
73 62 Feist - 1234
74 NE Duffy - Rockferry

.. 53 Ketevan Melua / Eva Cassidy - What a wonderful world
.. 70 Mika - Big girl

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This week, we've been watching and hearing...

• The Picture Man (Third Programme) One of life's drifters is inspired to set the whole world to rights, single-handedly, by taking pictures on his mobile telephone. It's a poignant discussion of urban decay and societal failure, and of the drift from an avowed leftist to a gratuitous right-winger. And all with the subtle wit we've come to expect from Jim Eldridge.
• Pop Britannia (Fourth Programme), telling the story of British pop music prior to the Beatles. That's Cliff and Adam Faith, and Joe Meek, and the resurgance of trad jazz. We still reckon that 1958 is the apotheosis of rock 'n' roll; that 1964 is also much more hit than miss; that 1984 was tremendous (but that's when we first got into pop music); that 1991 was better than we remember; and that 1997 was also consistently great.
• Top of the Pops (Fourth Programme, repeat from 15/2/1968) It's The mighty flan episode, and we reckon that a show like that - giving nothing more than the hits of the day - would work really well. Perhaps in place of the Thursday episode of Eastenders.
• Juke Box Jury (Fourth Programme, repeat from 10/1960) According to Nina and Frederick, Johnny remember me will only be a moderate hit. Hmmmmm. Note the elegant solution to the problem of end-credits: just stick up a bit of card for the producer. Can't go wrong with that!
• Six-Five Special (Fourth Programme, repeat from 1957) Gods, this was dull. An endless parade of jazz music and a few comedy turns, interrupted only by a ten-minute film of one of the presenters going mountaineering in Snowdonia! It's as if Strictly Come Brucie were broken up by a ten-minute report by Tess Daly's husband on the position of the Laffer curve in a modern mixed economy.
• Pop! What is it Good For? Paul Morley discusses what makes good pop music by exploring six songs - The na na song, Ride a white swan, Lola, This charming man, What do you want? (er, Adam Faith). The programme finally rescues itself from disappearing up its own arse with the final choice, Freak like me. The Sugababes one, natch, which can trace its roots back to... ah, spoilers.

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The presidential election in Georgia saw Mikhail Saakashvili returned to office with 52,8% of the vote. Several thousand opposition supporters staged a protest outside the central returning office in Atlanta claiming that the election was rigged. Observers from the Council of Europe said that the election was generally fair.

A fantastic second Test in Sydney - where Australia took three Indian wickets in the penultimate over of the match to win - has been spoiled after Harbhajan Singh was suspended for calling Andrew Symonds a monkey. As should be expected, India went off in a huff, deeply offended that anyone should suggest their characters were not as white as their team uniforms, and threatened to pull out of the tour. Lawrence Booth says that India's timing was all wrong, they were damned if they did, damned if they didn't. Umpire Steve Bucknor, who was at the centre of many dubious decisions in the Second Test, was dropped from the third. More: Sports Economist.

The British cabinet decided to build a new generation of nuclear power stations. It's an indictment of The Soup Dragon's parsimony that no meaningful experiments with wind or tidal power have yet been made. More: D-squared.

Another candidate for Labour's deputy leadership has confirmed that he failed to declare all his donations. Peter Hain, now the employment minister, failed to declare seventeen separate donations worth a total of £103,155 to the Electoral Commission, or to the Register of Members' Interests. It's also emerged that about half the cash went through a think-tank that didn't think, but did tank; this may have been a front organisation to avoid scrutiny. The new parliamentary commissioner for standards is investigating, alongside inquiries into Froglet and Mr. Benn.

The chattering classes were mouthing off this week about the plight of battery chickens, after a critical television documentary. The tabloids were full of speculation about a motion picture of the late Madeleine McCann.

We regret to report the death of Karl Grurnberg, algebraic researcher; and of Edmund Hillary, mountaineer and explorer.

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An unsettled week, with frequent showers. Mostly mild, though a wedge of cold air came down on Friday, bringing snow on the leading edge of the front - Birmingham saw a fall of about 2cm, the main problem was that it froze overnight. Similarly unsettled weather is to be expected next week.

07 Mo wind o/n, sun      6/ 7, 2.0
08 Tu showers            4/11, 1.5
09 We wind o/n, cloud    2/ 6, 5.0
10 Th cloud, showers     9/11, 3.0
11 Fr fog, rain, sleet   3/ 5,18.5
12 Sa sun                0/ 7, 7.5
13 Su wind, showers      9/10, 3.0

Rainfall in January: 45.5mm; monthly average: 71mm

Degree heating days: 369
2006-7: 152/499
2005-6: 309½/684
2004-5: 272½/556
2003-4: 358½/754

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