I was noodling around YouTube this morning, looking for appropriately maudlin songs to start my day with (it's a fast-paced life at Tube Ray HQ), and settling on things like Roxy Music live on Top Of The Pops in 1982:



And a little bit of Fat Larry's Band's Zoom:



As I skipped from video to video, it struck me - as it often does - how bereft we are of any decent music television these days.

Yes, there's Video Hits, but that's it, really (unless you have subscription TV, and even then, [V] and Max don't offer a whole lot more).

Where did it all go wrong?

It's a sorry day when you find yourself fondly remembering Molly Meldrum's House Of Hits and/or Pepsi Live, but them's the breaks these days.

Sure, there are musical elements to many of our "light entertainment" shows - occasionally someone will whip out a guitar on Good News Week or Spicks & Specks (which, while music-based, is not a music show) - and Adam Hills' new weekly talk show has admirably closed with a live performance each week.

But I feel a sharp pang of sadness when I think that today's youth don't have a show like Countdown or Recovery (in their glory years) to rely on each week.

The further we get away from Recovery, the better it looks in retrospect. I'm not sure what it was about the '90s exactly but the mind boggles at the idea of such a musically diverse show making it to air today.

Here is the greatest song of the 1990s, live on Recovery in '97:



Even the charts were different then - No Doubt followed by The Prodigy followed by Maxi Priest followed by Butthole Surfers. Can you imagine the Top 10 looking like anything other than a Supré playlist these days?

It's a shame that the failure of most of the music TV formats tested in the later part of the last decade have meant that - like original Australian comedy - it's a genre most stations won't touch with a barge-pole anymore.

Maybe it's like music itself - we've all been waiting for "the next grunge", "the next punk"; surely sooner or later someone will see that the best part of Jimmy Fallon's show is when he and The Roots collaborate with each night's guest, and turn it into a show in its own right?

Or maybe we do just have to face up to the fact that music television might have become, in this fast-paced day and age, a thing of the past.

I guess this is growing up.