I stepped by the Radio Nova stream on Friday night. It was very good. A bright mixture of modern up-tempo tunes, a few classics, but a nice mix in touch with today, I thought.

But, sigh. I was wrong. This was obviously a Friday night thing. People in radio have this weird idea that Friday nights must be programmed with up-beat dancing tunes, and so it was only Nova following the same trend and copying everybody else.

I step by Nova again this morning and I could be listening to Gold – except Gold plays a larger rotation of songs and they are not all as predictable as the Nova playlist.

Listening to Nova today is like going to your grand-parents golden anniversary party and just being able to shuffle from foot to foot whilst holding a fish-paste sandwich. Surely Nova was never this bad?

I mean, swaying gently from foot to foot to the predictable and highly overplayed sounds of:

Wet Wet Wet – Love Is All Around
Ultravox – Vienna
T'pau – China In Your Hand
Procol Harum – Whiter Shade Of Pale
Police – Walking On The Moon
Paul McCartney – Coming Up

..pleeeeese? How many times have these been played and overplayed and played again?

And then somewhere in amongst all that is a muffled recording of that dead bloke with the deep voice who everybody un-originally had jingles made by (remember that awful era?), saying something ever so funny about Nova.

It's very sad that the name Nova that apparently used to impress and motivate da yoof of Ireland, is now doing everything it was supposedly set-up to rebel against.