One of my husband’s most treasured memories is of the Charts Wall in Woolworths, in the early Eighties. Every single, from Number 1 to Number 75, was laid out in order, like a war-map of pop.

At a glance, a young boy jingling pocket-money in his pocket could see who was winning — Culture Club, three singles in the Top 20, all of them terrible — and who was losing: the hotly tipped Classix Noveau, new single bucking the Top 40 like a dog shies away from a bath. It was like an early version of Teletext — a slow, graphics-heavy rendering of the pop-cultural news.

You could watch a song strive, week after week, towards immortality — the dark sleeve of Don’t You Want Me Baby?, say, starting it’s salmon-like journey to impregnate popular culture. Slowly swimming upstream until, six weeks after release, it leapt to Number 1, and into pop history.

The fact that, 20 years later, my husband can still tell these stories, blow-by-blow, in much the same way that Laurie Lee describes a harvest, or getting a ciderous tumble in a barn, illustrates what the charts meant in the early Eighties. These were the days before MTV; before downloading music off the internet, and when video was still only in its infancy. For Eighties kids, the charts were the only field available to harvest, and Christmas Top of the Pops was Harvest Festival.

By the time I came into record-buying — 1990; it’s always a bit later for girls — things were much as they are these days: Woolworths showed only the Top 40, on a rickety rack next to the checkout that discourages standing and staring. It was displayed in such a way that the charts seemed of equal importance to the towel display, or the pick’n’mix.

In fact, to be honest, the pick’n’mix was more important: the Stone Roses might have been fusing guitars with dance beats, but Cadbury’s had just fused puffed rice with caramel and milk chocolate in the Boost. I know what I spent more money on in 1990. Buying a new song was just like buying any other thing for the house — a vase or some Velcro — rather than a single, but telling, bullet in a cultural war.

Still, at least Woolworths still sells singles – the Co-op, Debenhams, John Lewis, House of Fraser and Rackhams had all stopped by 1990. With singles now, perversely, more difficult to buy, the whole nature of the charts has changed. Records, rather than slowly climbing their way to the top over months of impulse-buying, like pilgrims walking barefoot to Mecca, now just zip straight into the Top 10 and fall out the next week, like pilgrims taking a cab to Mecca, having it wait for ten minutes and then driving home again. Men in their thirties with a shelf of alphabetical vinyl can get quite teary about that in the wee small hours.

So with this week marking the 50th anniversary of the charts, many of the Nick Hornby ilk are bemoaning the demise of the old-style Top 75, where every week saw an interesting skirmish at every level of the hit parade. With singles losing money left, right and centre, and now generally considered merely as expensive advertisements for albums — which is where the real money is — some are suggesting that singles charts should be scrapped altogether.

Frankly, this is the wrong way to look at it. We actually need more charts, not less. Millions more charts. Gossipy charts, charts that make it seem personal and exciting and valiant again.

How about, for instance, a Top 20 of Insane Publicity Budgets Thrown At a Single That Still Only Went In Around Number 9? A prurient rundown that would feature Posh Spice, Tom Jones, George Michael and Whitney Houston all vying for Number 1, and more successfully than they did in the real charts, to boot. Or a Journalist Freebie Chart, with scores for the sheer volume of journalists flown out for four days in New York when the band come from, and live in, Guildford? Or a Hate Chart, where people weekly text in their votes for the most hated band in Britain?

No one ever thinks to compile those kinds of statistics; but who would not thrill to a Friday-night rundown of the most loathed bands in the country, broadcast straight after Top of The Pops? Their singles could be played at a disturbing, slowed-down 45rpm in the background, while members of the public highlight the facets of the act that they find particularly noisome. Gaby Roslin to present, I think.

This hasn’t happened so far because, understandably, the record industry doesn’t like to draw attention to its failures — but we, on the other hand, would lap up all that stuff with a double-bowled spoon; and if you want to revive an industry that has become sclerotic and predictable, you have to chuck a couple of bombs in. It would be like the punk revolution all over again, but this time with statistics!

Frankly, these days I’ve abandoned the pop charts for the biscuit rundown in The Grocer magazine — “at the heart of the grocery industry since 1862”. There, you see the kind of real drama the pop charts can only dream of. No surprise to see the modish new invention of Snack-a-Jacks leaping it at Number 4; or, indeed, the Kit-Kat at Number 1 — still triumphal after a decade, like Whitney Houston with I Will Always Love You, but easier to share with a friend. But at Number 5, the wholly unexpected entry of the Fox’s Rocky! What is this biscuit? This mysterious, rootless, James-Dean like snack has just swaggered into town, pushing older, staid items such as the Cadbury’s Finger and Mini Cheddar to one side. It is the nibble-equivalent of the Sex Pistols appearing on Top of The Pops.

And how pleasant to find that the next cultural revolution is dunkable.

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