Before the advent of the hallowed Top-100-best-ever-countdown-of-the-things-we-hate-to-love-to-hate-in-case-it's-changed-since-the-last-time-we-checked ("pass the Kettle Chips Marjory, I won't be coming to bed tonight"), as far as I can discern, people were content to be democratic with their liking powers.

Or perhaps it was that liking had no power at all, other than to make you smile and give the New Seekers lyrical inspiration.

You could like an advert, and like another advert, and heck, maybe even like a third advert, and that was it.

Never were you required to calculate the exact degree of your liking in each particular case, and put them in descending order, and spend an evening of quality sofa time debating who would win in a fight between the Shake-n-Vac lady and the Lurpack butter man*.

It's jumped up, unhealthy power-wielding.

It's like picking teams for PE.

It's saying "I'm sorry Tony Hadley, I truly appreciate all you did for tartan frock coats, but in this regrettable instance I am voting Adam Ant as VH1 Top 80s Pop Hunkster… don't take it too badly… he's got the mental health problems and everything nowadays, you only have an extra chin.

"Adam needs this."

I am waiting for the backlash, the show I may have to write and film myself called "Weren't They All Equally Good?", where they take all the best things ever to have existed — the Poddington Peas, Moira Stewart and lemon and scampi Nik Naks to name but a few — then employ approximately 33,287 people to shout each one at exactly the same time.

The whole show will take no more than 12 seconds, and then we can rest easy knowing that nothing lost out or needs to feel inferior.

Until we have to make "Weren't They All Equally Terrible?".

While I'm waiting for the funding, it seems that a new strain of compilation show has been spawned (my mother rings up and tells me these things while I'm reading Proust in the library).

We've run out of books, films, heartthrobs, tearjerkers, "moments"** and other top 100 shows to merrily rank and re-rank, so now we're pitting actual decades against each other instead.

Not content with merely judging things, we are now judging TIME.

The BBC's Pop On Trial was the first of these jolly jaunts into the cultural continuum.

"Which was the best decade for music?" it brazenly asked.

"Well," replies the reasonable human, "each was good and bad in different ways, because that is the nature of human life."

I am content to listen to an eclectic range of music from across the broad spectrum of time, and enjoy each piece on its own individual merit".

"NO!" says the BBC.

"CHOOSE! CHOOSE! Do it NOW or Wogan gets it!"

And because reasonable humans don't constitute the majority of British TV and telephone owners, people voted.

Not only this, but they voted for the 70s.

What now?

Are all other decades prohibited, now that we have realised Hendrix's clear inferiority to Dave Hill from Slade?

Should I give up on music altogether, because it's all just gone downhill since Brotherhood of Man stopped recording?

I want everyone to turn off KC and the Sunshine Band just long enough to tell me what, exactly, have we achieved here.

Now they're applying the same treatment to comedy, in UKTV Gold's When Were We Funniest?, an excuse to play the same Morecambe and Wise breakfast sketch 25 times and keep Jo Brand in tunic tops and lipstick.

The only certain conclusion I can predict is thus: whenever we were funniest, it wasn't during the two hours I've just spent trying to decide.

And the Kettle Chips have run out.

*He's a four-inch high man made of butter.

She can dance, sing AND spray carpet freshener, in heels.

Unless his secret weapon is sky-rocketing cholesterol, that little trombone would be meeting her morning toast before you can say Vitalite.

**Of all the units of time, "moment" has to be the woolliest.

"Moment" can refer to a sneeze or a century.

If we wear floral breeches and bonnets for 30 years, fashion is "having a moment"; I, similarly, am "having a moment" if I drop my second section of Kinder Bueno and an old lady crushes it with her shopping trolley.

"Moment" is officially the woolliest unit in the Top 100 Woolly Units of Time, narrowly beating "wee while."