As I was out last nite I missed the BBC4 Top Of The Pops stuff so sat down this afternoon to watch it. 'Ooh a programme full of clips from the 'Oh this is shite, we'll bin all this' era of the BBC archives - lovely!'

Yet by the time we hit midway through each song up popped the annoying sometime sarky caption informing us that 'David Bowie is a Starman who fell to earth' and 'The Rolling Stones before their buss passes' etc.

Why?

Do they think the viewers are thinking, 'yes this is a great performance by this Bowie chap but who is he, what does he do, where is he now, is he old?'. Why not just show the clips without the need to pander to the terminally stupid with a 30 second attention span. Surely in this multimedia age if the viewer wants to know about someone they have seen there is Wikipedia.

I also suspect that the audience watching a stack of programmes about the glory days of ver Pops are perfectly aware of all the mindless drivel thst these captions spew forth. And the clued up teens tuning in for that matter. The music and performances are often unique so we don't need anything else.

Series in the past like the 'Sounds of The Sixties' used to manage to show 30 mins of classic pop TV and leave their info captions to the credit sequences.

Luckily this did not continue into the rebroadcast of the 1976 episode with "'Sailor aren't likely to be drinking more than Horlicks these days'" and "'Brotherhood Of Man' are now called 'Peoplehood of Personkind'"

Should I have written to Points Of View instead?