Top of the Pops

And yet, the performance that *should* be remembered is the week after, when Julianne sang live, so beautifully.

Ahh, I did wonder, seeing as she wasn't explicit about what she was doing the interview for.

I didn't know that Janice Long might have still continued to do TOTP if it wasn't for the then-upcoming Radio 1 FM simulcast. Of course it's still quite shocking that such decisions were being made as late as 1988:

I did. Radio One did not approve of me having a baby and not being married. That’s why I lost my show. TOTP were cool but Radio One decided to do a simulcast so I was persona non grata https://t.co/NCSMVB3r83

— Janice Long (@janicelongdj) October 11, 2019

Johnny Beerling published an autobiography about ten years ago or so, I wonder if it's mentioned in there. I never got around to reading it because it was apparently full of inaccuracies and spelling mistakes.

Yeah I hadn't realised that they got to do the second half of the song, the clip shows never show you that bit. When she did start singing I thought it seemed a bit half hearted, perfectly understandably

As they mention at the beginning it's an all female episode, something that if it had happened in 2019 the BBC would have made a bit of a fuss about... and a lot of saddos would have moaned about

So much pointless picture effects on this era of the show, pictures zooming and flying all over the place on most performances. I imagine they thought it looked impressive at the time, but it looks stupidly dated now, you pretty much never see it these days.

They had just got the first Questech Charisma units I think - which allowed for rotation, 3D perspective, multi-freeze, background channels etc., and since they'd been limited to very basic Quantel effects (they didn't have the Rotator option on their 5001s by the look of it) until then - they pushed them quite hard. (Up until Charisma arrived, you really had to use an Ampex ADO or a Quantel Encore to do decent 'flat 3D' DVE effects. Abekas had some 'pseudo 3D' effects - but ISTR that they weren't really in 3D space. Charisma changed all that, and was far more 'cost effective' ISTR. The BBC bought loads of them - and they were still in use in BBC News well into the 00s)

Back in the day those effects were seen as 'cool' and a way, believe it or not, of making your show more modern. I actually quite like the choices they made in how they used them - but I remember them first time round - when seeing those effects was genuine quite exciting!

Wait until the early 90s when they got the CLEO (Curvi Linear Effects Option) for their Charismas, that let you do Quantel Mirage-type effects (wrapping pictures onto 3D shapes and animating those shapes!). The Clothes Show, Going Live and Top of the Pops all used them. A lot... (CLEO used a Commodore Amiga home micro to design the 3D shapes (using a mouse driven GUI), Quantel's Mirage, dating back to the early 80s, used a Hewlett Packard Mini Computer, with the shapes designed in Pascal computer code, to do the same job...)

Forgive me for asking a daft question regarding the miming 'issue' discussed above. I had always assumed that ToTP was pre-recorded - was it, in fact, live? If it wasn't live, then why didn't they just do another take when there was the cock-up with the audio being heard in the studio?