The Pop Corporation

The wonderful thing about ageing is the acknowledgment of the relentless passing of time. Your knees start hurting. Your sleep is disturbed because you need to get up in the middle of the night to pee. You can end up in a full body brace because your sock was folded slightly oddly in your shoe, and now you’re in full traction agony. Aside from death and taxes, one other inevitable is pop culture news that just winds you up. You don’t even know why anymore. Maybe the words of a thing just resonate weirdly.

And today, in news that will wind old people up, on Christmas Day, Radio 1 will be taken over by people who are well known on TikTok.

You don’t really know what a TikTok is do you? You half heard something about people doing dances on it. Was it that thing where people were eating Tide Pods? Were you even sure what a Tide Pod was in the first place? It all just sounded so impossibly youthful and requiring you to create a crumb of attention, which you don’t have anymore, because you got so very, very old.

No-one is even making you download the TikTok app. No-one you know even uses it. And when was the last time you listened to Radio 1 or listened to the chart rundown? You’re not even sure what’s been number one for the past decade. There was a moment just now where you wondered if they even had a Top 40 chart, because isn’t it all streaming now?

From 2pm-6pm on the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth – a national holiday for many – 11 people who are considered famous from an app you don’t have the first idea about, will take over the BBC’s flagship radio station, and (you’re going to love this) will feature people from music, entertainment, comedy and finance backgrounds.

Finance backgrounds. TikTok comedy. You just want to drink your wine in peace don’t you? You just want to have Only Connect on while the slow cooker does it thing. You barely want to conceive of yourself of an evening, let alone what someone from TikTok is from a finance background is. It’s all too much isn’t it?

We’ll keep talking about this, because you’ve begun to enjoy the feeling of being both tired and annoyed all the time.

One of the people from TikTok is called Fats Timbo. You want to be annoyed, but there’s something holding you back. You’re right to hold fire because Fats Timbo is a prominent PoC and also a representation of someone with a disability, which you’ll agree is sorely lacking. You’re still a bit annoyed because you can’t be annoyed like you wanted to. It’s okay. It’s a dream come true for Fats Timbo, and young people should be allowed to have nice things, shouldn’t they?

You also haven’t heard of George and Joe Baggs. They’re going to be on Radio 1, and you’re not. So to is Maddie Grace Jepson, Kyron Hamilton, Madeline Argy and Max Fosh. We could have made one of those names up and you’d have absolutely no idea. They’re all just sounds to you now, like everything else. The top end of your hearing has gone, and you’re only able to pay a certain amount of attention these days, and have committed to half-listening to everything all the time.

We didn’t make any of those names up, for the record.

Radio 1 boss Aled Haydn Jones, who is probably like 15 years old or something, said in a statement: “I’m thrilled that this year we’re also able to make some room for new and emerging social media talent as I know our young audiences would love to hear a different side to their online heroes.”

Click this link to see who they are. It won’t mean anything to you, obviously, but you’ll at least know we’ve not made this up.

In other TikTok news, Dolly Parton just joined the platform. That hasn’t even slightly enticed you to set up an account, or indeed, try and remember the log-in details from when you optimistically set one up during lockdown because it might have been something fun and distracting to do. She has though, and she’s even older than you.

Maybe that’s the next stage of ageing, where we let go of our cringe, and just allow ourselves to be as embarrassing online as we have been in person for all these years.

Well done for reading this far. Go get yourself a bag of cracked pepper gourmet crisps. You’ve earned them.