Adieu, then, Top of the Pops. The show, once the highlight of every teenager’s week, threw up some magnificent telly moments, a personal favourite being the occasion on which TOTP’s dance troupe, Pan’s People (or was it Legs & Co?) skippety-skipped about to the Clash’s Bank Robber.

This involved them, in leotards and spangles, solemnly miming armed robbery. The girls were keen on literal interpretation: they also once danced around a cake that had been left out in the rain to illustrate MacArthur Park.

There were dozens of other memorable moments, among them Boy George’s first appearance (cueing teenage boys across the land to announce that they really fancied that bird out of Culture Club — for a few days, at least, until the sexually confusing truth dawned); the enormous blow-up picture of portly darts player Jocky Wilson used to illustrate Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ version of Jackie Wilson Said; Shane McGowan semi-comatose, not even trying to keep up with the backing track of Fairytale of New York; Barry Manilow singing Bermuda Triangle while standing in an inflatable paddling pool.

And now, after 42 years, it’s all over. I can’t say it’s much of a shame; the programme has been a ghost of itself for years, and besides the writing was on the wall as soon as The Tube — anarchic, funnier, wilder, more knowing, better — started airing back in 1982.

But still, it does feel like the end of an era, especially coupled with the end of Smash Hits magazine earlier this year.

When I was a teenager TOTP was, for a while, the only television event that was unmissable; when I was at boarding school, isolated from ordinary life, it felt like the only link to the outside world, and we all fell upon it ravenously, with obsessive and almost forensic interest.

I remember watching Madonna on TOTP in my first term at university, and feeling cheered that she existed; and I remember people who didn’t read the newspapers becoming politicised after listening to Billy Bragg on TOTP.

Hard to believe, in these days of round-the-clock television music stations, irreverent pop shows on T4, MySpace, the social networking site, and the rest, but TOTP really mattered, and provided water-cooler conversations up and down the country every Friday morning.

During the 1970s it regularly attracted 16m viewers. To put this in context, 7.8m people watched last year’s Big Brother final.

Without wanting to sound too pompous I do think that the demise of TOTP (the final episode will be broadcast on July 30) is yet another example of how atomised society has become. It’s not that nobody has a good time any more, but rather than many people’s idea of having a good time is spending time alone with their computers, downloading music and “chatting” to pretend friends whom they have never met.

In this context, it’s no wonder TOTP — bland, uncritical, smiley, relentlessly and exhaustingly upbeat — is no longer of interest to anyone. My 13-year-old son has never manifested an iota of interest in the programme: he went straight from liking Thomas the Tank Engine to liking MTV. He is also sure of the kind of music he likes; for him, as for many of his friends, the criteria are extremely narrow.

One of the virtues of TOTP was that it was such a mixed bag — you had Abba, and you also had punk. Now, if you like indie pop or hip-hop, you watch shows that are dedicated to it and need never come across any other musical genres. I don’t think this is a particularly good thing, breadth-of-knowledge-wise.

The proliferation of satellite music channels is also about instant gratification, a feature of modern life that drives old ladies like me to the heights of irritation. We used to have to wait until Thursday to get our weekly television music fix, and even then there was no guarantee that the song we liked would be featured.

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