By Shane Rodgers
When you get to a certain age you spend a lot of time saying you cannot believe how long it has been since something happened.
Is that really 30 years? 20 years? 50 years (mumble, mumble)?
The truth is that time does a curious thing as you get older. It goes faster, and slower.
Your childhood life seems like forever ago. And like yesterday.
The pop culture icons of your youth are suddenly 60, 70 or even 80.
Elle Macpherson goes overnight from walking on a beach as a 22-year-old in a soft drink commercial to pushing into her 60s.
Her contemporaries like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Michael J Fox are already there.
I now know why Simon and Garfunkel sang about “how terribly strange to be 70”. When Paul McCartney wrote about how life would be “when I’m 64” he was talking about a distant future.
For him, that is now a relatively distant past. You get the idea.
That is a really round-about way to talk about it being 50 years since the ABC Countdown program debuted.
For kids like me who grew up in the 70s and 80s, Countdown was the show that brought young people together every Sunday night to give us a taste of new music from all over the world and help us keep up with what people were buying.
It clashed with the 6pm commercial TV news so, for a lot of families, the teenagers in the house had to lobby for a second TV (usually a black and white “portable” tacked away in one of the bedrooms) to avoid a weekly fight.
What people often forget is that Countdown was quite innovative for its time because, besides showcasing high quality Aussie rock live, the format was hungry for overseas music that had decent video clips.
Swedish group ABBA owes much of its post-Eurovision success to its big Countdown run and video pioneers like former Monkee Michael Nesmith had a top 10 hit with Rio purely because his innovative “pop clip” suited the Countdown format.
After Countdown finished, music programs seemed to move towards clip programs like Rave or formats like MTV rather than a mix of live music and video clips.
But frankly it was never the same again. And I regularly lament that we do not have something similar.
I don’t know about the rest of the Gen X and Late Boomers group, but I find it really hard to find new music.
Spotify uses all of its clever algorithms to find stuff I might like. But it seems to think I am a 90-year-old teenybopper.
Radio seems to play the same stuff and I find most of the new music I hear pretty bland.
How hard would it be to have another Countdown to find new artists and introduce us to some cool new music from around the world each week? There is nothing old fashioned about that.
I think Molly Meldrum was generally better than any algorithm, as long as you can forgive his uber-awkward Countdown interview with the then Prince Charles.
His prediction that The Knack (who?) would be as big as The Beatles might also have been a little off.
That was part of the appeal. All of us knew we could do a better job hosting than Molly. He was a bit of a train wreck (meant in the nicest possible way). But we couldn’t look away.
Shane Rodgers is the author of Worknado – Reimagining the way your work to live.
