Production line shows throw kids to the lions

As any student of ancient Rome will tell you, one dreadful excess followed another. First it was gladiators pitting their skills against one another. Then, when this became humdrum, a few savage animals were added to spice up the whole affair.

After that had become rather pass, some Christians were added to this steaming stew of horror and cruelty, all topped off with a sizzling sauce of slave rape and bestiality.

Yes, the Romans. Brilliant strategists, the first to turn bureaucracy into an art... and also disgusting decadents who sealed their own fate with an insatiable appetite for depravity.

Thoughts of legions, centurions and mad emperors sprung to mind recently while watching a tape of Pop Idol: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Somehow or other, I had caught this revolting spectacle on video - probably after pressing the wrong button on the machine.

Anyway, I found myself drawn to this appalling exercise in humiliation in which a few music biz middle-aged men and a token bleach blonde get their rocks off by putting a limitless number of wannabe teenagers through the mincer.

The game goes like this. Spotty, stuttering, out-of-tune children are publicly destroyed by the score, in front of millions. They're told how useless they are, ordered about like dogs, and provoked into hopeless acts of defiance.

The excuse for this stage-managed bullying is always the same. In best estuary English, the losers are told "look love, I'm only being honest", or "you're OK for Butlins but forget the West End".

Oh, fine then. The panel's actually being kind. Doing the kids a favour. Hey - that's the name of the game, yeah? Right.

Well, I won't dwell overlong on this aspect of what now passes for British popular culture. We all know that the public distaste for Pop Idol is only matched by that selfsame public's sickly fascination for it. No doubt this was also the psychology of The Arena, too.

Pop music. It didn't last long, did it? I was thinking only the other day that its lifespan was about the same as jazz - a process of develop, peak and die over a period of roughly 45 years.

All that remains are live performances that remind us of how it great it once was. It 's this - together with recorded evidence - that keeps the flame burning.

Elsewhere, audiences for classic acts are steadily growing older.

It is becoming quite evident that rock and folk music are now where jazz was about a decade ago - facing the problem of what to do about an ageing clientele.

Basically, the youngsters are not coming up through the ranks.

Yes, there are young people, for example, at Worcestershire's Upton Jazz Festival. But there aren't enough. Just as a species of bird or animal needs a minimum number to guarantee survival, so does the music scene.

The tragedy of our time is that pop music is now no more than product. Admittedly, as a middle-aged man, I lay myself wide open to the charge of old fogeyism. But I know that there are many youngsters who also yearn for change.

As the father of two girls, I have picked up quite a lot down the years. Naturally, they've asked questions about my youth and what it was like to be a teenager in the 1960s. Obviously downplaying some of it, I do leave them with the impression that something was actually happening back then.

I suppose the main stumbling block with all this is the fact that very few of today's gyrating, midriff-flashing, squawking girls - now on television at all times of the day - represent any kind of tradition.

Not only do these factory-made stars not draw on influences, as musicians have always done, but neither are they aware of any.

You can say what you like about the limitations of the Mersey groups, but they all had one thing in common. They were heavily influenced by American music in general.

It was a kind of education and self-improvement. Not only that, they absorbed the Anglo-Irish-Scots traditions that had earlier found fused expression in the big northern English cities such as Liverpool and Manchester.

Listen to any of those early efforts and you hear echoes of Celt and African... the former in the harmonies, the latter in the beat. This was a marriage that prospered and endured, a riot of happiness and harmony that gave a new voice to a post-imperial Britain.

Queen Victoria had finally stopped tut-tutting, pulled up her skirts, kicked off her bloomers and shaken a tail feather.

Pop music - some of it profound, some of it sugary pap - added a new dimension to our lives. It was alive, had a sound heart beating from within... it could be sad, trivial, mysterious. There was variety.

Yes, variety. But not any longer - for as the assembly lines turn out carefully constructed but disposable acts, the sounds must never stray far from the dictates of corporate policy and the rigid confines of the marketplace.

This is a world in which outrage is always mistaken for individuality and freedom confused with exploitation... a murky region where talent is no more important than the ability to actually play a music instrument, perish the thought.

On New Year's Eve, a party of us went to a ticket-only night at a Worcestershire pub. I have to say that the food was glorious almost beyond description, a banquet for the proverbial.

But as for the disco and the laughable disc jockey in charge of the musical proceedings... well, the crassness beggared belief. It was a mixed crowd of all age groups, so, not unreasonably, a fair cross-section of music was expected.

Not on your life. One obscure track followed another. When he was asked - told - to put on some Tamla Motown or rock 'n' roll, it became quite obvious that his idea of classic retro was three minutes' worth of Jive Bunny.

No Eddie Cochran, Little Richard or Jerry Lee. Not a hint of Four Tops, Otis Redding or the Wicked Pickett.

This was the musical equivalent of Mother Hubbard's cupboard.

Only the trademark stoicism and reluctance of the typically British partygoer to cause a fuss prevented a French-style riot of a burning barricade formed from party hats, crackers and paper plates.

To cap it all, the halfwit missed the midnight chimes. The New Year was two minutes old before a punk version of Auld Lang Syne assaulted the senses. Not so long ago, that would have been a hanging offence.

It's all quite sad. Once, a band would have rocked or swung in the New Year. There might have been spot prizes, maybe some cheeky patter with the frontman fooling about a bit. Fun, in other words. The evening would have been a planned campaign, programmed to reach a crescendo as the hands of the clock approached the bewitching hour.

Tragically, this is what passes for entertainment these days. It's symptomatic of how homogenised the popular music industry has become.

Like many other areas of our lives, the industry is run by global corporations with no interest in talent or creativity, rather a mass-appeal product resulting in a fat balance.

In the meantime, there will be more programmes like Pop Idol, manifesting even more distasteful forms of ritualistic humiliation. When these no longer satisfy the appetites of The Mob, then further extremes will be sought and reached.

Just like the Romans, really. Et tu, Brute?