Has Culture Secretary Andy Burnham been scouring the Word blog recently and looking at those entertaining entries in the TOTP competition.
Anyway a desire for a revamped TOTP, family music show was a surprising plea in a speech last night to the RTS.
http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/minister_speeches/5483.aspx

"Television at its best has traditionally operated as a showcase for new talent, catapulting the new names into the spotlight. I used to love the fact that Tony Wilson, God rest his soul, used to abuse his position and throw an unknown North West band on to play out the credits on Granada Reports on a Friday.

Where is the successor programme to Top of the Pops bringing the family together to discuss new music? Wasn’t it a good thing to give people a mixed presentation of different music where the same bands couldn’t appear two weeks running? "

well this should be down your alley. basically a simple make your own mix tape site with thousands of 12 track mp3 mix "tapes"
confusingly called er. http://www.muxtape.com/

here's a sad one
http://mattpayton.muxtape.com/

here's a happy one
http://noah.muxtape.com/

but there's thousands. hours and hours of browsing.

To carry on the rather loose theme of the week, this is a pic of a sign i found in Resident Records in Brighton. The faintly apologetic tone for how difficult it is to put records/cds in categories that the punter might understand is of course starting to recede as a problem. Last FM don't have some bloke going round scratching his head worrying about whether the pigeon detectives are "indie rock" do they ? All that difficult music discovery stuff is slightly more sophisticated than hoping you might see a cover you like in the "alt-country" section.

Its a great shop by the way. in case you're passing by (I don't work there . i just like it). The title of the photo by the way refers to IA which stands for the rather earnest and useful web discipline/career; Information Architecture where people (they used to be of course librarians) worry about how information is modelled.

'Charlie Brown. You're the only person I know who could take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem"

Still on CBS every year in the states and has been every year since 1965. It really is about the birth of Jesus. Has the scene(s) parodied by the Hey Ya Charlie Brown/Outkast video. Snoopy is funny. Has *the* finest, mournful jazz score from Vince Guaraldi including the first appearance of the "linus and lucy" theme (you will know it!)
Never on british tv for some reason. A relief after the astonishing, ambitious and mad Liverpool nativity. (the icicle works ? david yip ?)