Ten to the Top (Radio 2)

The new era has arrived, Radio 2 without Ken Bruce. He has taken Popmaster with him to Greatest Hits Radio and Radio 2 have created a new daily music quiz called Ten to the Top.

I'll start by giving my point of view about Ken Bruce leaving Radio 2. The only time I listen to Radio 2 is for Popmaster so I'm going to go wherever Popmaster goes. 

I agree that the BBC are trying too much to modernise Radio 2. Obviously all music will get old at some point. As much as I hate todays mainstream music there will come a time in the future when it will have its place on Radio 2.

The key thing though is in the future, not now. Most days before Popmaster they would be playing a brand new record that is the "Record of the Week". When I went to Radio 2 in the Park they had Clean Bandit playing and Emeli Sande was booked to play too. These should be Radio 1 artists, not Radio 2.

Then there's the "Who's been recently singing....that's being played a lot on Radio 2" questions on Popmaster. OK an 80s group making a new record I can understand, but there's also the likes of Jack Savoretti who I would never have heard of had it not been for Popmaster and he's never even had a Top 40 hit. I even noticed that Stormzy was on Radio 2 recently too, if that's not Radio 1 music then I don't know what is.

I also believe a DJ is never too old for Radio 2. For as long as I remember Radio 2 has always been a station for old people. However whilst some of their choices for new DJs are questionable, I don't agree with the criticism of them being too young. Vernon Kay, the replacement for Ken Bruce will be 49 when he takes over in May. When Popmaster began in 1998, Ken Bruce was 47 and had already been with the station for over a decade.

Onto the quiz then. Like Popmaster it's 2 contestants going head to heard with 10 questions each. The difference is there's no bonus category, no 3 in 10 and a different scoring system.

When I heard the first question of the first quiz it was a 2023 question and one thing I feared from this quiz was it being too modern. To be fair though there's not been too many modern questions in it's short existence so far.

There has inevitably been criticism of the new quiz. The biggest one is the scoring system. Question 1 is worth 1 point and the questions that follow are worth 1 point more than the question you've just answered if you answered it correctly or 1 point if you were incorrect. Then you get to play a joker on a question of your choice to double your points for that question.

So far I've got every answer correct so it's a no brainer to play my joker on the final question to get 65 each time. Once I get a question wrong though I'm not sure how easy it would be to keep up with my score.

My main criticism when playing so far is that I'm not always sure what question number we're on. The same would happen on Popmaster but I knew that if the question was spoken it was 3 points and if it was a clip it was 6 so I didn't really need to know. I also think they could move it along a bit quicker.

Let's not forget that Popmaster wasn't without its faults. I don't like questions where you have to name the film a song was in because to me that's testing film knowledge not music knowledge. I also don't like it when you pick a bonus category like "Lucky Numbers" and get played a clip of a song with numbers in the title but have to name another song.

At the end of the day though I love a music quiz so the prospect of there being 2 music quizzes to play now is a good thing. More often than not I listen to Popmaster on catchup anyway so nothing is stopping me from listening to both.