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I'm always looking at our presumably automated in store radio station at work and its brain dead programming policy that is actually excellent due to it being so awful. In recent years, there has been an explosion in so-called Halloween music ('Thriller', 'Somebody's Watching Me', 'Ghost Town', basically anything with a theme ranging from obscure to macabre). You hear it on Strictly Halloween show.....well, we had an entire day of it yesterday. Except The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead by XTC. Christmas songs imminent.

Music for the Royal Fireworks next?

They could well have crossed a line today.

Between two pieces of pop music that ceased to be popular with communism in Russia, Dan and Lindsay, the two humanoids that oversee our daybreaks, were discussing how food prices will be affected by Britain's decision to leave the European Union. Followed by an informed culinary review of our current Frozen Meal Deal for £5, plus a good wine recommendation.

No, of course they weren't. They were idly and without any research done on the subject (maybe a quick glance in the Daily Sport) attempting to scrutinise His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales over his personal life.

The Constitution of the United Kingdom puts Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I I as Head of State with her directly to descendants as Heirs to the Throne and ABOVE the political system of this country. Therefore, unlike elected ministers such as Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon, Members of Parliament, Governmental and non-Governmental organisations etc. who are subject to democratic scrutiny and accountability by the people, media etc. and rightly so, the Royal Family being above politics constitutionally, are wholly immune from scrutiny, any attempt as such would therefore count as a crime against the nation state. Or treason.

Dan and Lindsay, To the Tower with you! Or Belmarsh, whichever is closer. However, being the liberal that I am, maybe the pair of them should go on a UK Citizenship course where they may learn a little about our System of Government as a Monarchy, and how we operate as a nation state. They may also just get squeezed into their retarded intellects that it is against British constitutional protocol to hold the Royal Family to account. Or back to school anyway.

And I've not even heard 1890 featured on The Retro Years at 10am yet. Faure wrote his Requiem that year.

I read the citiizenship test book recently. I wouldn't be allowed in!

So, one day away from work today so reflecting on some of the three and a half minute long tunes we're told that are amongst the 'songs we love' by the media agency responsible for Co-Op Radio. One such song that has been on every day for the past five months goes 'I've got this feeling inside my bones...', to which I always want to shout 'Sciatica!'. For that, I've christened it The Sciatica Song. Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2v5rBTpLgM

Sadly, they've stopped playing Charlemagne in recent weeks. I often swap the 'my Charlemagne' for 'my Kayleigh Jane' as in my bakery colleague. But at least they're still playing this one, yet again I've heard it on every single shift I've worked since the beginning of June:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pSKe5MBhgA

That Newman bloke looks as though he's been rubbing shampoo in his eyes...

Hopefully, it's Co-Op brand formula for normal hair from all the royalty payments he's had from having one of his songs played daily in their stores since last spring.

Back in work tomorrow. Possibly Monday 7th for the Christmas music with a bit of luck. I say the first seasonal chav ditty I'll hear this year will be McCartney, simply had it, a wonderful Christmas time.

Then again, the following Monday after Remembrance might be a good bet also. In the meantime, I rather suspect that Jamiroquai were going cheap in the Performing Rights Society market place, which is why we're hearing a lot of their tracks, especially 'Canned Heat'. I never can understand that band, particularly their lead singer, one Jason Kay, whose first name is shortened to one syllable so he 'becomes' Jay Kay. What's even more mystifying is the blindingly obvious American accent in his singing voice, when his speaking voice is blindingly obvious Essex.

Jamiroquai again today. I know what they're going to play before they play it, you see.

Ooo, you must be cyclic....like their playlist.

We also had more treacherous and anti-British scrutiny of the fifth in line to our Throne. Or should that have been a replaying of the tape.

But look for the roses in the weeds. We also had The Divine Comedy, aka Neil Hannon whom is the son of an Anglican priest from Derry and is responsible for the Father Ted theme.

Divine Comedy are excellent - the lyrics are so clever!

That 'My Lovely Horse' song should have been released as a single.....but not the version Frs Ted and Dougal ended up performing on stage (and shaming Ireland in the process!)

Still no trace of any Christmas music. There's a slight possibility it may be tomorrow as it's promotion change. Or after both two minutes silences are out of the way on Monday. But we have 95% of our Christmas stock already out.

'Love Train' by the Ojays is another ditty that suffers from chronic overplayment, as does 'Radio GaGa' by Queen. If they want to play Queen, why don't they play God Save The Queen?

So today, we had some signs of awareness of world affairs as there were plenty of hidden references to a certain election.

We had Bruce Springsteen - one of music's biggest Democrat supporters, followed around half an hour later by Cher, likewise for the Republicans.

Then when the result became clear of Herr Drumpf's victory (yes, his family are German immigrants), along came 'He's Misstra Know It All' by Stevie Wonder. Do not abandon hope for this audiophonic organ yet. Still no Christmas songs.

Fancy knowing (or caring! ) who american pop stars vote for! You're a mine of information, lad.

STILL no Christmas songs despite the fact they've been on for a few days at Mrs. Brum's place of work. They've taken the wise choice, waiting till Remembrance is over before unleashing Slade, Wizzard et al on us for this year.

I think the advertisers have finally twigged that the public hate early Christmas ads; hence Tossco's ad saying 'Not already?' and a whisky ad along the same lines. Cynical or what?

Heard the radio 'programme' in the Midland bank today. I think Co-op radio might have a rival on terms of cheesiness...

HSBC Live, as it identifies itself as, is actually nothing like our offering. There is news bulletins on the hour, which suggests there is some degree of live content along with all the markets news you'd expect from being in a financial establishment. The trivia is quite noticeable as well, with us the references to Kim Cardashian scratching her bottom are on request an hour at the most frequent. Told you, Co-op Radio is so bad it's brilliant!

Asda FM is another matter entirely....

I popped into work yesterday for some bits and bobs, still no Christmas music. They do play them in November and December according to trusted sources (Kayleigh) . I'm back at work on Monday morning, and it's three earlies instead of my usual two. Then on Thursday, I've got to make my way across Birmingham after work to see Elaine.

Perhaps they've gone all PC lest they 'offend' their non Christian customers. My Hindu friend probably knows (and loves) more carols than ME and that's saying something! Wasn't Brum where the term 'Winterval' was first used with a straight face?

Yes it was, but I believe it was solely done to expose the easily riled nature of the editorial staff of the Daily Mail and other similar tabloids in whose hearts and minds it's still 1951. As soon as the euphoria died down, the Christmas decorations and markets came straight back up. We have some lovely Christmases here, and very inclusive to all communities as well, as the Eid Melas are, again to the annoyance of the Daily Hatemail et al.

We do have Christmas songs at work, we shall eagerly await them. Any day now. If they played 'All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth' every day there would be too many members of staff in stitches.

Love that song. E gets hacked off when he asks me what I want for Christmas and I sing that. One day I know he's going to find two front teeth and wrap them prettily and wait for Christmas evening gleefully.

Giving my Carols from Kings CD it's first airing of the season, got the Carol of the Dirty Socks on as I type. Back to work in the mawning, at least I'll be able to hear some of the shortlisted carols in this year's BBC Carol Competition on the way in, if I'm doing lates in December.

Had our first Crimbo card today, and I have put fairy lights in the window but not turned them on, so His Nibs hasn't noticed them yet!

Still no Christmas songs! Superdrug have them on. We did however have Pop Music by M and Vienna, plus some other cheap song whose lyric sounds rather rude.

Another annoying sixteen bar pop song they've been playing every day for a week, have no idea who is responsible for producing it, but it sounds like 'tell it to my aaaaass, you've really cut the grass'. And today we heard Dan and Lindsay, the Lobotomy Twins discuss the 'supermoon' phenomenon that occurred in Britain a few weeks ago, nothing wrong with discussing the news but that is hardly news any more. Computers cannot think like we humans can, you see.....

Still no Christmas songs with less than one month to go to the 25th December. Yet again, when the computers' pound shop sensor module finally detects that it is the season for some Jona Lewie and The Waitresses, it'll be the 3rd of January.

...and the Easter eggs will be on display with the hot cross buns.
Perhaps the lobotomy twins are very slow readers and it's taken them this long to read about the supermoon? We had too much cloud to see it. I'll have to wait another 48 years or whatever.

...well, wasn't all bad today. We had Curtis Mayfield 'Superfly' whilst I was putting the eggs out. If only I could find a way to hack into their computer music program and put some more intelligent music onto their e-playlists. And stop the Daily Star-ish celebrity trivia we do not need to know about.

Of course, the best option would be silence, as is the protocol in Waitrose. We don't all like chavvish Anglo-American commercial pop, neither do we all like classical jazz and world as I do.

Maybe, just maybe we'll be the only British retailer that doesn't play low grade crappe regurgitated every Christmas..... Tell it to my aaaaaaasssssss was on yet again today, I asked a chav woman in work who sings the song and she told me 'The Little Mix'. So now, my wisdom is reinforced.

To my shame, one of that lot comes from High Wycombe!

Christmas songs began at 0700 this morning, but very few and far between - one Christmas song every 45 minutes or so. And virtually unknown songs in lieu of the favourites we're told by the Command Module that we all love (Slade etc.). However I did catch 'Stop The Cavalry' earlier on. I was not expecting any European baroque and early carols, but I was expecting a non stop chavvy diet of Waitresses, Wizzard and Shaking Stevens to work along to. So maybe money's tight this year.

Not tight enough for the usual diet of overplayed stuff. We're getting a lot of plays of 'All Right' by Liverpudlian Britpop band Cast and lately, the latest addition to the 'click this toggle box for a daily play at £7.99 per play' is Too Late by Van Morrison, released way after the heyday of the Irish bluesman.

I'm beginning to suspect there may be some subtle degree of North Korean-style mind control in Co-Op Radio. Because every so often they play a link that goes 'playing the songs you love' and another that goes 'we only play the songs you love'. So they're telling us what songs we love and what songs we don't love according to their fascist blueprint...and then playing them anyway before we can rightfully disagree. And the more they're played and we're told we love them, the more we all feel like Winston Smiths from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the less cut off the silly little agency that provides this information war becomes from us, the people.

Sounds incredibly dystopian.....of course, it really is common sense to all of us that some of us like Bach, some of us like the Beatles, some bhangra and some Bieber, and you will never be all things to all people. Co-Op Radio NEVER plays the songs I love, full stop.

Can you actually communicate with them, or are they insulated from the real world? It'd be interesting to see what the reaction would be...

As employees, we like John Lewis Partnership have some degree of say on how the business is run and how it can be improved. I eagerly await my moment to let rip.

When you're sat at home having a nap or trying to cook a meal, and some scruffily dressed herbert in a tabard bearing the name of a charitable organisation bangs on your door and goes into full sales pitch about how such and such an organisation needs your money, wants your money etc. these herbert's, or the tactics they employ to extort, are unrepresentative of the charity they like to kid you into thinking they represent. They do not work for Save the Children, Cancer Research UK, Help for Heroes etc. They work for professional middlemen, or agencies to you and me. And it's exactly the same with Co-op Radio. It is absolutely nothing to do with the business, rather it is produced cheaply and shoddily by an outsider sitting at a computer with no idea how to program it.

Indeed. This week's 2005/1985 'Retro Years' balls up was a case in point, and Lindsey Lobotomy introducing the Bee Gees and giving us U2.

Had two famous, albeit low grade seasonal tunes today, courtesy of Wizzard and Paul McCartney. This weekend, I discovered Victor Hely-Hutchinson's Carol Symphony, along with Ralph Vaughan-Williams' Fantasia on Christmas Carols. Now, that's what I call seasonal belters that get you in the mood for Christmas without inducing mania or nausea. Now all I need to do is to contact Anonymous and get them to hack into their system, replacing Dan and Lindsay with people who sound a little more like Radio 4 announcers.

We also heard what I presume was a new (by Co-Op Radio standards; i.e from earlier in 2016) tune by Status Quo, which was in the correct place to be aired, at least.

...and as a footnote, I've been trying to google search for a song that their politburo thinks we should hear every day, it goes something like: 'deedle, de-deedle, de-deedle, and changes. Deedle, de deedle, and changes, took ages'. I think it sounds like a cross between 'We Are Each Other' by Beautiful South and 'Wings' 'Helen Wheels'.

No idea...male singer? Female? Indeterminate?

It's a female singer/ vocal group, as the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles may have put it in the day. I like to try and do lyric searches of some of the simpletonian audiophonic regailments we get thrust in our faces daily. At least I found another one just now, 'Surrender' by Tor Miller, who is a white soul singer from Ynyshir. But not the one in Wales.....

I felt like, as Ian Anderson put it, a dead duck today in work. I needed Christmas songs to cheer me up so imagine my surprise when they didn't play a single one today. Do they think Christmas songs are for weekdays only? Maybe. We did however get the depressing and badly performed one about the Magi who've got a semi by the sea.

Eureka!

Traced that mysterious song that sounds like Helen Wheels. It is called Mother by Jerry Williams, who is a teenage singer songwriter from Hampshire, apparently.

The drummer has his hat on backwards and it's a fact that all intelligence drains from the head when that happens. The chap at the back looks like a twelve year old with a Brian Blessed stick-on beard...but the song is quite jolly.

Listening to the pop song 'properly', maybe I shouldn't have used Helen Wheels as a similarity. It's more like that old Fleetwood Mac ditty from Tango In The Night that goes 'tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies'. Quite a lot of Kate Nash copycattage also.

I think I may be turning into Petroc Trelawny who, yesterday morning described the Bouree from Praetorius' Dances from Terpsichore as 'like a fly in a jam jar'. Carols tomorrow morning at 8, Co-op Radio can stick their cheap robot-generated repetitive garb up Rudolphs red nose.

Talking of which, questions must now move towards how long after Christmas Day and in to 2017 we'll still be getting Christmas songs. Robots after all do not have a sense of time and space, and Mood Media (who are responsible for Co-op Radio) cannot be expected to pay somebody to go out in the holidays and reprogram the robot and tell it Christmas is over now, as their emphasis is on doing everything on the cheap.

Silence would save even more money.

Seems like I'm not the only one....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/2 ... complaints

and also (with advance warnings that this link is to a Conservative Party-supporting newspaper):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/musi ... otest.html

Hadn't realised they played unsigned artists. Were any of them any good?

Some of them are, but it just proves my point about not
being able to please all people with whatever they choose to broadcast. The unsigned artist policy would probably fit into the ethos of the Co-op Movement, i.e promoting the underdog and if they played solely unsigned artists then I'm sure John Peel can rest in his grave okay and they would move a notch or two away from crass garbage. But would the tabloid press pick up on it, bearing in mind the fact they, as Conservatives, are out to discredit us BBC-style as we are, of course, founded upon socialist principles?

I still say silence would really be golden here....muzak free shopping like Waitrose.

Definitely...I hate finding that I'm suddenly marching down the freezer aisle in step with whatever's being piped through the system - like being controlled remotely!

Yes, we had all the old golden greats today, changes took ages, shut up to my ass, and even one or two Christmas songs that are neither good nor popular.....oddly enough.

I do believe the John Newman song Olé, that has been played every single day since my first day at work back in early June has now gone out of the play list as I haven't heard it so far this month. It has therefore only taken them six months to totally reconfigure their play list. I'm missing the Beverly Knight one Meet Me In the Middle.

For the very first time this year today, I heard Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses from the early 1980s on Co-Op Radio today. One of Britain's most popular and subsequently overplayed Christmas songs of recent times, so one can only thank Mood Media for underplaying it at a time when we actually want to hear it....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPUwv_20p5I

Heard 'Wonderful Christmas Time' today - my fave! Everyone else seems to hate it...

We had a bigger Wings hit today, Mull Of Kintyre, Christmas no1 in 1977, along with Oh Lori by Alessi and I Feel Love, by the now late Donna Summer.

We also had some active annoying of a certain Paul Nuttall with acknowledgement of climate change and global warming by Dan and Lindsay whilst nattering about why we don't have white Christmases any more in Britain. Have they never been to the Cairngorms?

And the Darkness Christmas hit from 2003, which includes a subtle so-called knob gag....