...but now - Falco, with Rock Me Amadeus! Christ, don't you just hate The Chart Show? Now, the chances are you're not familiar with the above cliffhanger, forming as it does (most of) the onscreen narrative from the video to Sigue Sigue Sputnik's 1989 end-of-career flop Dancerama. But you probably have seen the promo for The Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony, in which Mad Richard stomps down a street sulkily barging passers-by out of the way. And you've more than likely caught Radiohead in No Surprises, where Thom Yorke's existentialist angst is slowly submerged in a tank of rising water. And it's all but inevitable that you saw Oasis manfully stretching their acting talent to the limits, playing a pub-rock band as the urban tale of Stand By Me wound itself artfully backwards around them.

Unless you're one of the lucky 10% with access to cable and satellite music shows, though, you almost certainly didn't see whether someone finally did turn round and smack Ashcroft's stupid skeleton face off, whether poor old Thom finally did buy the farm in a panic of glugging and bubbles, or whether Radio Supernova did, as we surely all pray, actually turn out to be the the final, Alan Partridge-style, fate of Chris Evans. And I don't know about you, but it's driving me screaming mad in the brain.

Because this is the hideous reality causing the latest affliction crippling the attention span of the nation's youth - Unresolved Pop Video Narrative Trauma. With The Chart Show now practically the only terrestrial-TV outlet for pop promos, young directors are pouring their souls into meaningful and artistic vignettes which, tormentingly, no-one will ever see the revelatory end of. (Unless, ironically, they get banned, in which case The Midnight Hour or suchlike will painstakingly analyse every last frame for the benefit of the arts/pervert crowd.) It's like watching The Usual Suspects without the last three minutes, or having Reservoir Dogs stop dead just before the climactic warehouse shoot-out, and who'd have put up with that?