BBC: No "Ding Dong" Song

Saying that they are "between a rock and a hard place," the BBC announced today that they will only play a five-second snippet of Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead during this weekend's countdown of the Top 40.

Sales of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead have soared since the former Prime Minister's death on Monday, aged 87. Mr Cooper called the decision "a difficult compromise". The song is set to take the number three spot in Sunday's countdown, according to the Official Charts Company. Speaking to Radio 1 Newsbeat, Mr Cooper said: "The decision I have made is I am not going to play it in full but that I will play a clip of it in a news environment. "When I say a news environment, that is a newsreader telling you about the fact that this record has reached a certain place in the chart and here is a clip of that track."

In a separate blog post, the head of Radio 1 added this: "To ban the record from our airwaves completely would risk giving the campaign the oxygen of further publicity and might inflame an already delicate situation."