There are many pieces on this Blog that mention Pop Master, the BBC Radio 2 mid-morning quiz. You can hear it live on the Ken Bruce Show Monday to Friday at 10.30am or use BBC Sounds to listen back to any shows from the previous 30 days. You can also download the last 30 days’… Continue reading Pop Master: My best week ever, Part 3 (w/e 16-Apr-2021)
There are many pieces on this Blog that mention Pop Master, the BBC Radio 2 mid-morning quiz. You can hear it live on the Ken Bruce Show Monday to Friday at 10.30am or use BBC Sounds to listen back to any shows from the previous 30 days. You can also download the last 30 days’… Continue reading Pop Master: My best week ever, Part 2 (w/e 2-Apr-2021)
Our listening habits have remained the same for many years. Our DAB Digital Radio is set to BBC Radio 2 most of the time. Occasionally it will be retuned to Radio 4 for “Desert Island Discs” or to 5 Live Sports Extra for some cricket commentary, but we return it to Preset 2 immediately afterwards. Much of Radio 2’s programming consists of old hits. Every Saturday afternoon “Pick of the Pops” features the charts from… Continue reading “Glee”, “Strictly” and chart data
Today is known by some as Blue Monday. This piece in The Scotsman describes as “the most depressing day of the year”, for the following reasons: “It’s the day when the financial pressure of the Christmas just passed hangs over us most, the weather is at its worst, and the extra pounds we’ve acquired over the holiday… Continue reading “Blue Monday” and the Henry Fern Collection
Happy New Year to you. Last month, in this piece, I wrote about Mariah Carey rewriting UK chart history when her seasonal hit “All I Want For Christmas Is You” reached #1, 26 years after its original release. It had previously reached #2 on four separate occasions, a unique feat for any song. As noted… Continue reading Stuck at 2: now Wham! rewrite chart history
“Stuck at 2” has been a regular theme on this Blog, with articles and lists about the songs and artists that made it to #2 in the UK chart but didn’t make it to #1. There are links to all of these pieces here, on the Trivia Menu. In 2019 Mariah Carey made chart history… Continue reading Stuck at 2: Mariah Carey changes everything
Today is the First Sunday of Advent and in keeping with tradition I have dug out our handful of Christmas-themed CDs. Also, as is now traditional with that music format, I had to track down a CD player that still works, apart from the one in the car. The first one I tried (a portable… Continue reading The earliest Christmas #1
[Drafted November 2020, finalized several months later] There are many pieces on this Blog that mention Pop Master, the BBC Radio 2 mid-morning quiz. You can hear it live on the Ken Bruce Show Monday to Friday at 10.30am or use BBC Sounds to listen back to any shows from the previous 30 days. You… Continue reading Pop Master: My best week ever (w/e 6-Nov-2020)
Sonofabitch (alternatively sunuvabitch, son-of-a-bitch or even “son of a bitch”) is an old-fashioned exclamation or term of abuse that I have been hearing a lot over the last month while I work my way, very happily, through all 11 series of the sitcom “Modern Family”. (I wrote about the show in this earlier post.) I… Continue reading Word of the week: sonofabitch
Back in 2018, in this piece, I posed the following question: What do the songs “Virginia Plain” and “Up the Junction” have in common with each other, and with no other singles that have reached the UK Top 10? It’s one of my favourite pop trivia challenges. The answer was revealed in that earlier piece,… Continue reading “Up the Junction” and “Virginia Plain” revisited
The Compartments 