Anybody who reaches 56 and still wants to shock people is all right in my book

I am not going to lie to you and say I am a great fan of her music, but I like her gumption.

Anybody who reaches 56 and still wants to shock people is all right in my book because the world could do with more women who don’t give a damn about what people think of them.

A lot of nonsense was written about Madonna being removed from the Radio 1 playlist, mainly because the national paper that broke it, which isn’t revered for its accuracy, rather put words into the mouths of the BBC. Contrary to the crux of the story, nobody there, as far as I have been able to ascertain, ever said she was, as was claimed, “too old”.

But they did say something much worse. While some people might be old at 56, most aren’t, and Madonna most certainly isn’t, but let’s not pretend she’s young when compared with the target audience of Radio 1, which is 15 to 29. She’s old enough.

What’s far worse is saying that Madonna is not relevant to those 15 to 29-year-olds, which a spokesperson for the station certainly did, on Facebook.

It’s this supposed irrelevance of older people to the younger generation that should make anybody cringe if, like me and Madonna, they have reached their second half-century.

Nobody likes to be called irrelevant.

You won’t find a single Madonna track on my iPod or even among the vinyl records gathering dust in my attic because, musically, I can’t stick her. But that doesn’t mean she is irrelevant or that she didn’t write a whole chapter in the story of popular music.

Like everything else that has been around for the past 50-odd years, Madonna helped to shape the present, and is one reason the world in general and music in particular is where it is today.

She can’t be un-invented any more than you can un-invent Elvis, The Beatles or The Sex Pistols, and only fools would consign living people to history or write them out of it.

An ironic element of the BBC’s defence – and supposed proof that artists are not chosen according to their age – was that while Madonna has been dropped from the playlist, Paul McCartney, who is 72, is still on it.

They neglected to say that’s mainly because his single is a collaboration with Rihanna and a rapper called Kanye West, who are very popular with young music fans, for reasons we can’t imagine. I’m sure even Sir Paul would be deemed irrelevant if it wasn’t for this collaboration.

And another irony is that while young people are being spared the irrelevance of oldies like Madonna, the same is not true in reverse.

You could say that a former member of The Beatles had every reason to consider a rapper to be irrelevant to him, and although I would sooner eat broken glass than listen to rap, I have to admire Macca for doing it.

The mistake that Radio 1 and others like them make is thinking old people lose relevance, when really the opposite is true: the longer you stick around, the more relevant you become.

So Radio 1 should change its tune, in more ways than one. At 47 years old it is no whippersnapper itself, and looking dangerously irrelevant to the vast majority of the population, who might not tune in any more, but still end up paying for it.