Top of the Pops

That's odd. As James said, they usually leave that intact.

They've always left in at least some of the final link before, even when it's literally just been reduced to the presenters saying "goodnight" with Paul McCartney inexplicably standing next to them (as the bit where they talked to him was edited out).

I think the fact that we have any kind of repeat at all (Smithy notwithstanding) is certainly appreciated. The budget is probably next to nil, so rather than have to do some elaborate editing, it was (in this instance) easier to chop the entire link. It really wasn’t that spectacular a link anyway.

They should go to no extra expense in editing Smithy mentions out of editions.

I personally think it's madness not to transmit programmes made with public money due to a whim of someone sadly no longer with us.

It's unlikely to be a significant extra expense. They will need to comply and PSE check (and remedy any PSE test failures) the archive export in an edit suite, and package up an AS11 DPP delivery file - so there will be little or no marginal costs.

I noticed tonights episode had several occasions where the brightness in the picture went up (including on the pillarbox bars), presumably something in this episode that today's standards didn't like, though I couldn't tell what it was myself- unlike when it was the flashing disco ball behing Boris Gardiner.

Also, I have an off air-recording of the original broadcast of this episode, there's about 15 seconds more of the Madonna video at the end than BBC4 showed tonight. Looks like the extended playouts we used to get on BBC4 until last month have gone for good We're getting less than was originally broadcast now, whereas before we were usually getting a good 1-2 minutes more.

I can’t pretend to be too bothered about losing the end of a music video that’s widely available. When it was the audience dancing it was really worth keeping on. Also assuming many of the masters have the video going to the end, it’ll be pushing up the running time to 30-32 minutes which will no doubt be a right pain to accommodate.

Looks like the unusual election day 87 edition (the one presented from a tiny set without an audience in the TV Theatre and was nearly all videos & repeats) will be on BBC4 on the 8th March

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00030wr

Tonight's episode rather unusually ended with a perfomance rather than the video, and had scrolling credits, which shows off one of the quirks of 1980s capgens (presumably not seen on TVs of the time due to overscan) where the text vanishes before it reaches the top of the screen- but the red blocks go all the way to the top.

Looks like both the box and the text don't quite reach the bottom either.

No, that's how I cropped the image from taking a screenshot from the iPlayer, looks like I left in some of the grey under the video.

Also interesting how tonight's episode was almost entirely in the studio, apart from the breakers and Madonna at Number 1 (who I imagine would never have turned up to the studio at that point in her career). Quite unusual at the time, but would be the way Chris Cowey did things a decade later.

Looks like it's back to normal with 4 videos (plus the breakers) on tomorrow's episode.