There was a brief shot of the outside of Elstree studios at the end of the Story of 1990, so I'm hoping we get some decent coverage of the revamp in the Story of 1991.
Though the more I look at it, they've shown footage of the wrong Elstree. It looks like it's footage of the Elstree Film & TV studios before they sold half of it to Tesco in the 80s, which may not bode well for the research in the show itself.
It looks like it's this area that's in that footage:
Last edited by james-2001 on 3 October 2020 11:58pm - 2 times in total
There's not the novelty of 'a brand-new decade' either, so hopefully, 'The Story of 1991' will be more about the politics of Year Zero than the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Gulf War... (fingers crossed)
I did enjoy Story of 1990 but it's shame there wasn't much on the production of Top of the Pops itself. Not surprising as not much really changed. What they did cover (miming, competing with other music shows) will probably be featured more in Story of 1991 as I presume it was those factors that led to the revamp. But the seeds for that were sown in 1990.
It will be interesting to see 1990 and the first 9 months of 1991. My guess is seeing these big 90s tunes of the time being performed on a show that still feels a bit stuck in the late 1980s.
There was a brief shot of the outside of Elstree studios at the end of the Story of 1990, so I'm hoping we get some decent coverage of the revamp in the Story of 1991.
Though the more I look at it, they've shown footage of the wrong Elstree. It looks like it's footage of the Elstree Film & TV studios before they sold half of it to Tesco in the 80s, which may not bode well for the research in the show itself.
It looks like it's this area that's in that footage:
You're right. That shot is from the roof of Stages 7/8/9 looking southeast towards "L" block and the now-demolished Stages 1-4.
I must be getting old. The first 1990 TOTP with Gary Davis didn't have one song that I thought was any good.
I must be becoming a masochist, as I'm now watching the next one with Simon Mayo.
The first show suffered from that post-New Year problem of older songs climbing up the charts (the 'gift token' effect), combined with fewer acts available for a studio appearance and 'video' artists being eligible for the line-up.
Notice the different copyright legend on both editions - in the correct new corporate style for the first week of 1990, but the following show had the old BBC logo and MCMXC in the same OCR-B font as the captions.
I like a lot of them, but I’d just turned one at the time and I’m drawn to everything about the “neighties” (late eighties-early nineties) in general, similar to how my late-1960s born parents have always been big on their birth era.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for the 1990s as we know them to start appearing in a recognisable form on the show, whether it’s the Year Zero revamp or earlier on - I’d never heard the Silver Bullet song before and it could easily be a drum and bass song from later on in the decade, the kind of thing you’d easily hear on pirate radio in London well into the noughties - even had the odd (censored) swear word in there, still rare at this time.
Did anyone else notice that the 2000 TOTP2 Lennon special had been updated with newly remastered videos (and presumably the new remixes). They were accompanied by recreated TOTP2 graphics and a new 2020 copyright date.
This adds to the fact that it has already been updated once before, with the post-2001 3D graphics (presumably because it was originally made for the 60th birthday celebrations in 2000 and then later updated to remove any references to that)
I've always wondered exactly what and when that video for Just Like Starting Over was made, seeing as it's clearly from a lot later than 1980. I don't think there's ever been any re-releases or anything it could have been made for.
That particular video doesn't look like it's been remastered though, unlike the others, they've just taken the old 4:3 letterboxed SD master and cropped it to 16:9. And overlayed new captions, of course.
Last edited by james-2001 on 9 October 2020 11:45pm
This blog post says it's from 2000 to commemorate 20 years since his death. It makes sense as it's very very similar stylistically to The Beatles' Free as a Bird video that was made in 1995.
The new Starting Over video was released in December 2000 for the 20th anniversary of Lennon’s death. It’s similar to the ‘Free As A Bird’ video made for the brief Beatles comeback a few years earlier. (EDIT: Beaten to it!)
It’s reminded me that the video for ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ that everyone knows with the black & white shots of the choir singing is actually from 1992, one of several made for a special VHS at the time. There was a cheap BBC-made video in the 1970s featuring some still photos and footage of a church, but as with many Lennon songs it never had an official one until the 1990s, with the then-current incarnation of the Harlem choir miming to the song. Yoko Ono tried making a new one in 2003, but it was very grim and just featured lots of shots of war and poverty to make the point that, no, war isn’t over yet - she saw the funny side in a documentary when she said she sent it off to various channels and they just replied “Can we show the old one instead?”.
