What Would You Think of British Music If All You Had Ever Seen Was Last Night's BBC Music Awards?

Imagine you didn’t know much about modern British music. Anything. You don’t know the Arctic Monkeys, you’ve never heard of grime, you think Sam Smith is a craft ale, and you’ve got no idea what an Adele is. You’ve never heard “Hello” or any of those other ones, those ones that were everywhere. You or your dad has accidentally done something weird with the television, maybe trying to fix it to get softcore adult channels or free sports, and you’ve accidentally cut in on the BBC Music Awards, broadcasting live from Birmingham. Imagine, imagine if you thought this was all there was to modern British music culture.

Your hosts: a Fearne Cotton and a Chris Evans, dyed to within an inch of his life, perfectly Wotsit orange, dressed in a velvet peacoat like a Mod magician. He’s introducing One Direction. They sleepwalk through a performance of “Drag Me Down” and when they walk down the stage the screams from the girls in the crowd intensify. They’re here just for them, the fans: for the Instagram likes, for the updated Twitter bios - “10/12/15: The Boys Changed My Life!!!!!” Screams so shrill, they could be happiness or horror. The Boys - referred to always as ‘The Boys’ and never ‘artists’ or ‘men’ or ‘singers’ - are dull-eyed pros. The Irish one, Niall, looks completely empty. His head is basically a balloon with a wig. The pretty one, Harry, has hair like Andy Carroll. They finish and one of them - and really it could’ve been any of them at this point - asks fans to not throw phones at them anymore because it hurts when it hits them.

The disparity between the performance and the crowd reaction is so huge that it’s actually surreal. Chris Evans looks confused. “We’re enjoying ourselves!” He shouts to the camera, to himself, an arm around one of One Direction, any of them, like a drunk dad trying to hold onto his children as two policemen and a social services worker close in. Chris Evans, soon to be star of the doomed revamp of morally questionable magazine show Top Gear, tries to keep the kids onside by getting them to name cars. “WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE CAR, HARRY!? LOOK! HE LOVES IT! LOOK!” The girls in the crowd still scream as The Boys mumble about Aston Martins.

You look on at the pained performances of the shapes onstage - here comes Ellie Goulding, and now James Bay - a seeping insipidity that manages to be so inoffensive that it borders on vulgar. The islands that brought you the Stones and the Sex Pistols, Ian Dury and Goldie, are populated by men with guitars in management-approved unkempt beards and five-panel hats, sappy big balladers with faces buffed smooth and round like a seaside pebble, and precocious Tumblr avatars playing thumping Max Martin rip-offs and performing dances choreographed specifically with the lucrative Sassy Reaction GIF market in mind.

Chris Evans - yes, I’m not finished with him yet - greedily sucking all of the lines from the autocue like an engorged manager doing all his intern’s gak at a Christmas party, is splitting all of Britain’s musical output into two categories: dad music they play to please their kids and dad music they play while having a midlife crisis in a lay-by the M1 - and there’s likely not a dad-rockier band in existence than the Stereophonics, who are now coming on stage to perform.

On their latest album - somehow the four-piece’s ninth, the rest of their oeuvre melding into a single entity like a rat king - they make literally no play to win over new fans and simply dare old fans to end it all. Stuck in a loveless relationship, both parties are too tired to leave, too pained to push, doomed to sway together forever through countless, endless rock ballads until the sweet hand of death brushes the hair from over their ears and whispers, “It’s okay, remaining members of Welsh traditional rock band Stereophonics, you can finally rest.”

Little Mix are, if this awards show is anything to go by, Britain’s last, vague sense of hope. Their song and performance is actually quite good plus the week previous Jade Thirlwell tweeted her disgust at the decision to bomb Syria, making her Little Mix’s de facto “punk” - Patti Smith for the Snapchat generation. Also, thematically, the choruses to Little Mix’s "Black Magic" and Wu-Tang Clan’s "Gravel Pit" are identical which means this is about as close to edgy as the BBC Music Awards will ever get. The only artist on the show who sounded a little bit different was Jack Garratt, the obligatory “singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist”. He plays the loop pedal and dresses like every graphic designer ever and sings songs which could soundtrack GoPro montages of students from St. Albans backflipping into Vietnamese lakes. Still, on tonight's line up, finally watching someone genuinely playing something live is actually quite weirdly comforting.

As the end of the show looms and old snake hips, Rod Stewart himself, is wheeled out, forty years on from his cocaine suppository heydey, and everyone is contractually obliged to keep telling us what a banner year this has been for UK artists. It definitely has, but you’d never know it from this show’s baby-proofing, white-washing, and re-imagining of modern British music.

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