Top of the Pops

Check your PM's.

Here's the chart run down from the 24th Jan 85.

Best consult the Popscene episode guide



https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/popscene/1985-t1269.html

If the advance schedules in Digiguide are correct, they are also planning to skip over the 21st March edition. Clips of it were shown on The Story of 1985 which seemed to be of VHS-level quality, so it seems not to exist at the BBC in broadcast quality, which seems rather odd for a programme as late as 1985.

They did, however, show Diddy David Hamilton's home video recording of 31/07/77 back in 2012, the original mastertape of which was wiped, but only after complaints when the advance schedules showed it would be skipped.

With Smittied episodes either side, it means we'll move forward a whole month in the space of 24 hours! It's typical that these sorts of problems, such as the appearances by Gary Glitter in 1984 which resulted in two more episodes being skipped, never seem to coincide with episodes that are already Yewtreed or Smittied.

I find myself wondering how on earth they could have lost an episode as late as 1985. Was it originally a live episode? The several episodes from 81-84 the BBC had which were only in "mute link" form (we got all but two of them on BBC4 thanks to viewers sending in off-air copies and them dubbing the audio from the links onto them) were all ones that went out live- so it seems the cockups came from failing to properly record a live episode.

I don't think so - around this time the Radio Times would normally mention if it was a 'live presentation', and it doesn't say it is for this edition.

Apparently the opening Nik Kershaw performance from that episode appeared on a TOTP2 episode in the early 00s, would be interesting to see said TOTP2 episode to see how it looked. Though I imagine most copies out there will only be from VHS recordings anyway so probably wouldn't be able to tell either way.

Actually a quick look at Popscene shows it was the Billy Bragg performance from that episode that got shown on TOTP2, back in March 2002. That's the same performance we saw VHS quality footage from on the Story of 1985, would it really would be intriguing to see a copy of said TOTP2 episode to see if it's VHS quality there. Though back in 2002 as I said it's mostly likely people would only have been recording on VHS. Was that episode repeated on UKTV G2/Dave, as there's some high quality recordings knocking about from their TOTP2 repeats.

The Roxy was, basically, Top of the Pops but on ITV. The concept actually came from the network and a couple of ITV companies competed to make it, and as The Roxy Book (as seen in every single charity shop in Britain for several years) pointed out, Tyne Tees started building the set before they even found out they'd won the contract because otherwise it wouldn't have been ready in time for the planned launch.

The line about bands not wanting to come to Newcastle to perform has been taken from a piece I wrote on Offthetelly years and years ago now, and has been used as a citation on its Wikipedia page for ages. It is pretty obvious that a pop show in London is always going to be more convenient than a pop show in Newcastle - the bands were prepared to travel there for The Tube because it was an important shop window and you got to perform several tracks live in front of an audience of active record buyers, whereas The Roxy only offered three minutes of miming in front of a really casual audience. That said, in those days bands would have to travel around a bit anyway, what with local radio and regional ITV, and they did manage to pull in most of the major acts of the day. Indeed I know MARRS and Los Lobos appeared on The Roxy when they were number one, but not Top of the Pops (which is particularly impressive when it comes to MARRS because they weren't even really a band).

I guess the concept was sound because in those days ILR was a big hit and the Network Chart was popular and I think there was a general feeling Pops was looking a bit tired. But in the end it was always going to be a bit of a hiding to nothing because it was just Top of the Pops on ITV so it was always going to look a bit second hand, and it turned out nobody really needed two shows doing the same kind of thing, and the ITV audience was also quite conservative as a whole so they weren't especially interested. In this era I seem to remember only watching it if we were bored, or if there was a record out we were so excited about we couldn't wait until Thursday to see it on Top of the Pops - I certainly remember tuning in purely to see the video for Star Trekkin'.

Course, there was a massive revamp in January 1988, where they got rid of all the dancehall-style set-up, locating it to a Pops-style studio and renaming it as Roxy: The Network Chart Show. And whereas they did have Kid Jensen and Kevin Sharkey every week - which was apparently because research showed people wanted the same presenters every week and not rotating ones like Pops (and which explains why there was a period around the same time when Pops used Mike Smith and Gary Davies every week for several weeks) - in the revamp they started rotating with people like Pat Sharp and Paul "Vision Technician" Nolan. And former Pops producer Gordon Elsbury arrived as producer.

That's actually the era of The Roxy I most remember, because at Christmas 1987 I got a telly in my bedroom so I started watching all kinds of stuff, including The Roxy every week. And in all honesty, I probably couldn't have separated them in terms of quality at the time, I watched them both and they were both OK and pretty much the same. I think the general view from the wider audience was that the show was much better. But seemingly ITV had decided the show wasn't washing its face and it would never catch on enough to justify continuing it for another year. I was shocked when it ended, though, I didn't know it was happening until they said it was the last one.

It was only in the last few weeks that Thames dumped it to a post-midnight slot (although they kept the Saturday morning repeat). Someone I know said they remembered Steve Wright announcing it on Radio 1, where he said they were doing that "just as it was getting better".



Yes, and at the start CDUK had a bit of a ropey beginning, and it seemed a bit crap to go straight from The Chart Show with guaranteed big hits to CDUK because, before it was established, it couldn't attract many big acts so most of the studio performances were from the nether regions of the charts. But again, it's all about the audience, and the Saturday morning slot was so important because it could target the people going off to actually buy records later that day, so it became a particularly important shop window for artists and could attract big names.

You're right about the revamped Pops being inspired by CDUK. I think you can probably date it almost exactly to the moment in early 2003 when CDUK had a regular record review spot, and one week Louis Walsh and Mel C were the guests and Louis Walsh started making jokes about the Spice Girls and Mel happily joined in making jokes at his expense, all very much in good humour and with no real malice, and that got in all the papers with loads of name checks for CDUK. And funnily enough soon after Pops started introducing features including a record review spot, seemingly to create the same number of column inches. But of course CDUK was an hour long so they were able to include these things and give them time to breathe, which was never the case on Pops.



Hmm, it's worth remembering though that the shows with mute links existed like that because they wanted to keep the performances for future use but not bother with the links which were considered of no further value. So it may well be the case that the performances from that episode still exist in a transmittable format, but the rest of the show doesn't.

Well, if that was the case surely they could still show it by stitching it together from the VHS copy and broadcast copy.

Not sure how much sense it makes that they'd just wipe that episode's links as "not of any value" when they haven't done it with any others anyway. It's not like there's a spate of episodes only existing on VHS or only with mute links, there just seems to be this one only on VHS, and a few live editions from 81-84 with mute links (there don't seem to be any pre-recorded editions post-76 that only surivive as mute links).

(xpost) Tyne Tees thought that Thames were "doing down" The Roxy as an excuse for the fact that they were getting low audiences in the early evening anyway, whatever they put out (and it is true that people would have taken longer to get home from work in the London area); Thames counterargued that while they did have problems in the early evening, The Roxy's figures in their region were nonetheless no higher than those for Reporting London, and it was "almost unheard of" for a light-ent show to get the same figures as a current affairs show. Tyne Tees' argument was that Thames were trying to run the network and that it was doing much better in other regions, so just as the rugby league authorities' belief that Grandstand was treating their sport unfairly was really about the much greater sense in the North that the BBC of those times was almost a regional broadcaster posing as a national one, Tyne Tees' resentment that Thames had "killed their show" is really about the much greater North/South tensions in ITV at the time, arguably unavoidable during a political era such as that one.

The Roxy at the very beginning had links to the very earliest days of Top of the Pops, when they got Alan Freeman to read the charts and then promptly dropped him. But he was Jensen's regular stand-in on the Network Chart at the time and was still presenting new charts every week on Capital (based on the London subset of the Network Chart sales panel, it would appear), so it isn't as surprising as it might seem. Clearly, it would have done better in the regions that didn't put it opposite EastEnders, which obviously had a far, far greater youth audience than any of the ITV soaps.

The copy of the Foreigner promo video with the dodgy tracking at the top of the screen (as first seen on the 20-12-1984 edition) was on this evening's repeated show; I'm certain a better quality version was shown on the 17-1-1985 edition.

Looking at the picture quality of the performances on YouTube, it's possible they were sourced from there - there's one version of "Between the Wars" with intro intact, starting off from the same point as seen on "The Story of 1985". As it's a Read/Wright episode - and one which didn't get repeated on UK Gold in the 1990s, we'll soon find out if those potentially-online-sourced clips were used purely for convenience's sake.