Top of the Pops

If Andy didn't know his episodes were coming up, doesn't that raise certain questions?

If other presenters knew far enough in advance to be able to opt out of having their shows repeated (eg Mr M Smith) why didn't Andy get advance notice?

Of course it may just be that his agent is not as prov active as others.

I'm thinking it likely confirms that presenters have no input into whether their episodes get repeated or not- other presenters have said as much, I know Mike Read, Simon Bates and Mark Goodier all have said so (so had Noel Edmonds depending on if you believe it really was him posting on the Digitalspy TOTP thread). The Mike Smith situation seems to have been a unique set of circumstances.

I imagine if a presenter really doesn't want their episodes shown they could kick up a fuss and hope the BBC complies, but it seems they don't need to seek permission, or even take the courtesy of informing the presenters that they're due to be shown.

One thing I've noticed looking at Popscene about next week's episode, as well as the All About Eve incident and Kylie's studio debut, it's also entirely studio based, apart from the playout (a couple of repeat performances though). There's not even any breakers. Very rare at this point in time.

The Kim Wilde performance shown on this week's BBC Four repeat is, itself, a repeat of the pre-recorded performance shown two weeks' prior, giving the studio team an extra breathing space to the chart rundowns.

btw, anyone spotted the BBC Music promo using Tina Turner's studio performance of "Steamy Windows" from a February 1990 edition of TOTP - a possible sign the BBC Four run may linger on into the 90s?

How far in advance are 'The Story of…' documentaries produced?

I'm pretty sure not as far ahead as making one for 1990, when we're still 3 months away from the 1989 one being aired!

Jenny Powell did tweet a photo a around July of her recording an interview for the BBC talking about TOTP and No Limits. Don't know if that was for the Story of 1989 or another programme though. A clip of her presenting with Jakki Brambles from a November 1989 episode did somehow make it into the Story of 1988 for some reason though.

The question is, now we should (hopefully!!) be getting an uninterrupted run for 1989, will they spread the episodes out for the whole of 2020? If they intend to squeeze them into a 6 month period, they'd have to show 2 per week without any breaks.

We've had discussion before on which pre-September 88 (when the Radio 1 simulcasts started) episodes were made in stereo, watching the video of the infamous All About Eve performance, that's quite clearly in stereo, which you can tell from the applause when the song finally fades up in the studio (at around the 1:20 point):



When it comes to how they handle 1989, possibly they'll move the Sky at Night elsewhere (it was on Tuesdays before the TOTP repeats started), and there's already been a couple of weeks this year where they've put a second episode on a Friday, so they may well do one, or both, of these things next year to get 1989 and 1990 with (hopefully) no skipped episodes to fit in.

After the second stereo episode recently, they've all been mono again as far as I can tell. We'll have to wait until the episode after that is shown, if that's in stereo too then it may (finally) be the start of regular stereo episodes.

And we hopefully will be seeing this infamous performance in all it's glory on Friday.

It was for the Story of 1989.