No Rock And Roll Fun

IT'S BACK: In what we think might be the first instance of a show turning into an entire channel, The Chart Show - that Saturday morning indulgence cruelly axed to make way for the jabberings of Ant and Dec and the Cat Deeley woman - has returned. In the form of an entire channel. It's pretty much a round-the-clock version of what you might remember, only with the Indie chart on more often than once every three weeks. Video Vault, fairly rubbish screen facts, "Still to come" and New Releases. Plus, it's doing Jazz charts and other stuff like that, which makes it probably the most (possibly the only) eclectic music station on the air. Channel 458 for Sky Digital viewers.
Who might get even more choice soon - plans for a Pay Per View service from BSkyB got shelved a couple of weeks back (uber-man Trevor Dann lamenting that the labels wouldn't give him decent enough music early enough to make it worth his while), but today's MediaGuardian is reporting that Sky is now planning three own-brand music stations to come soon - Tony Ball of BSB citing how quickly EMAP's stations have built a following at the expense of MTV to "prove" the gap in the market. Which is as maybe, but the EMAP stations went clearly for areas that MTV hadn't attempted to exploit; it's still too early to say, but it looks as if the more or less on the run creation of "me too" products (MTV Dance and Base against Kiss; MTV2's rebirth as Kerrang-ish) has won share back without much effort for the lords of Camden Lock. Sky might have to come up with something pretty special if it's not to be left as a shabby rival.