Gotta (who by-the-by is being a berk)
Only because you were.
has provided a mechanical explanation for why the song was not identified at all. And that may be true.
I can confirm that that is true.
However, given the importance of the song and what it stands for, if they had the will or inclination to correct the problem of this, the most meaningful Christmas number one for a generation (on the Christmas No. 1 show!) they easily could have.
I'm sorry, and this obviously isn't going to be popular at all on this forum, but that is entirely subjective. Just as the Justice Collective meant so much to a lot of people this year, the Military Wives being number 1 last year will have meant so much to a lot of people.
In fact I've just watched back the portion of TOTP that Justice featured in and I was expecting it to last around two minutes or so as would be normal, but no, it lasts 3 and a half minutes. That is extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, long for a music video on Top of the Pops. Quickly looking at last year's TOTP special on the BBC's internal player the Military Wives got a total of 2 minutes and 40(ish) seconds.
They'd have daren't not to have. Media bias is subtle and often unconscious but of course it exists.
It's comical that you take this all from an innocent link to camera that lasted a few seconds and was quite obviously made with the intention of being usable no matter what was number one given that they, at that point, did not know who the number one would be. "Media bias" in a fucking light music programme? Get real.
Some people on this forum would be staggered by the amount of people who come from Liverpool and work behind the scenes at the BBC. Several of my colleagues are from Liverpool, another's from the Wirral and one's from Southport. I know at least four other people in the department who've been to uni in Liverpool, one of whom stayed in the city for 10 years afterwards and travels from London to Liverpool each weekend. The head of daytime (who announced his departure last week to become director of Sky1) is a Scouser. One of the heads of BBC Entertainment in Salford is from Heswall and still lives there. All my other colleagues represent the rest of the UK (and indeed further afield) very well - television most definitely is not an industry made up of Londoners. No one there hates Liverpool. Contrary to popular belief on this forum that is not actually the mentality of the British people. No one makes programmes in the hope that they can diminish the reputation of Liverpool.
Mistakes are always going to be made somewhere; someone researching a fact incorrectly and getting it wrong, not casting enough participants from an area as they should have; but this astonishingly minor moment on a music programme viewed by less than four million people was absolutely not in any way biased against Liverpool or the Justice Collective.