As Blur once sang, it’s the end of the century – well, nearly. We still have one year left of TOTP repeats to go before the new millennium and rather neatly, this will also be my final year of reviewing them. Nearly 10 years of writing this blog is is my limit and finishing in this year almost dovetails with my leaving working in record shops (again after nigh on 10 years) so it just feels like the time is right. Before I get to that point though, there are all of 1999’s shows to be watched, dissected and pronounced upon. So what can we expect from the final year of the 90s?

Well, away from music, 1999 saw the launch of the Euro currency. 27 years on, the UK is still sticking to its initial decision to remain with pound sterling. Just like in 2016, there were a spate of deaths of people from the world of showbiz. Dusty Springfield, Stanley Kubrick, Rod Hull and Ernie Wise all died within three weeks of each other in March. TV presenter Jill Dando was murdered on her doorstep the following month. On 30 December, George Harrison was stabbed by an intruder in his mansion home in Henley-on-Thames. He survived but within two years would be dead from lung cancer which had spread to his brain. In happier news, there’s a royal wedding as Prince Edward married Sophie Rhys-Jones but does anyone really remember it or care? Tracey Emin’s infamous My Bed sculpture was exhibited in the Tate Gallery. 15 years later it was sold at auction by Christie’s for £2.5 million.

In sport, Manchester United won the treble in May in dramatic fashion beating Bayern Munich in the Champions League final with two goals in injury time. A month later, they announced that they would not compete in the following season’s FA Cup competition in order to concentrate on the FIFA Club World Championship. The profile and stature of the FA Cup has been in decline ever since. As the year draws to an end, fears that the Y2K bug would bring about the end of the world surfaced but it all turnedout alright in the end as no planes fell out of the sky and traffic lights continued to function. Finally, Millennium celebrations were held across the country including the official opening of the Millennium Dome and the unveiling of the London Eye. The New Year’s Eve fireworks display were a bit of a damp squib though.

And so to musical trends. The time of the dominance of girl groups over boy bands seemed to be coming to an end with the latter reasserting their grip on the charts with American acts like Backstreet Boys and NSYNC battling it out with the UK’s Boyzone, Five and most terrifyingly of all, an emerging Westlife. By contrast, neither the Spice Girls nor All Saints even released a single in 1999. However, four of the original Spice Girls line up did have solo hits this year with Geri Halliwell having the most success with two No 1 singles closely followed by Mel C who scored a pair of No 4 hits. The new breed of instrument playing girl groups like Hepburn and Thunderbugs failed to fully gain support of the record buying public though.

Dance music was still about and this year, that ubiquity translated into some of the biggest selling singles of 1999 with the likes of Eiffel 65, ATB, Shanks And Bigfoot and Mr Oizo all securing places in the year end Top 10. Albums wise, it was all very safe yet again with Shania Twain, ABBA and The Corrs all having huge success. Only the likes of Fatboy Slim, Lauryn Hill and The Chemical Brothers seemed to put up much resistance to the tidal way of the mainstream.

As for me, I had a steady-ish year, staying put in the same record store for the whole 12 months (albeit with another change of manager) but as the new millennium approached, I was hatching plans to turn my back on all that and even Manchester which had been my home for nearly the whole decade…