Top of the Pops

But while the 1991 onwards era is looked down upon as the worst in the show's history, I for one am looking forward to being able to experience them and see just how bad or good they really were! (if BBC Four gets that far…)

My impression of watching the first new-look show first time around was one of utter dismay - they'd taken away the familiar presenters, the cosy studio, and a complete rundown of the Top 40. Even ending the show with the theme tune instead of using the time to play another song seemed pointless.

It was to all intents and purposes like watching an entirely new programme, just one that happened to have a familiar title.

I would agree with this - the late eighties and early nineties are absolutely the era I was watching Pops intently and I have so many memories of it, it was the period I'd watch it in my bedroom with my face centimetres away from the screen, and refuse to let anyone come in. So I'm well into this period, although I would probably suggest that as a television production it's a bit second-rate compared to the glorious spectaculars of the early eighties. I think the neon waterfall that arrived on the set last week stays there pretty much now until 1991.

As you say, Andy was pretty decent at it, and there may have been some less adept hosts, but that was the case when it was all DJs, Paul Jordan springs to mind. The other obvious point is that it also ensured there were more women on the programme, given Janice Long's first appearance last week was the first time a woman had hosted the show all year, and it was July. In fact most of the new presenters weren't initially engaged by Paul Ciani as after the All About Eve episode he doesn't actually produce the show again until January and Brian Whitehouse takes over the rest of the year. I don't know what Ciani was doing instead but the same happens next year where he's absent for the entire autumn and Stanley Appel produces for several months.

Funnily enough I remember in the Top of the Pops sticker album they did in 1990, sticker 1 was actually Pip Schofield, who was one of the few CBBC presenters who never did it, presumably the editors of the sticker album just assumed he had. He would have been very good at it but presumably he could never do it as he was live on Radio 1 on Thursday nights, his show following Pops. That's quite an interesting story because the original plan was for his Sunday afternoon show to be repeated on the Thursday, but very early on, maybe even the first week, they forgot to record it and so asked him if he wouldn't mind coming in to do another show, and that worked so well they just did it live every Thursday.



I've said this before but they actually hadn't announced the presenters anywhere before the new show began, and when the first new episode began with a voice-over introduction, I assumed there actually weren't going to be any presenters and the whole thing was going to be done in voice-over only, only for Franklin and Dortie to show up after the first track. They didn't appear in vision that much, mind, there were a lot of links done out of vision, clearly Appel favoured that kind of presentation as in mid-1986 when he was in charge for several months they did a lot of it.

I still watched Pops during this period, although with gradually diminishing enthusiasm, and by 1993 I "had it on" but often read a magazine or something while it was on - and actually it was the arrival of subtitles that got me interested in it again, it was quite exciting at the time. But I was also going off pop music a bit at the time, circa 1992 there wasn't much of interest to me. I was an awful adolescent at the time but I do think pop was at a bit of a low ebb in this era, I don't know whether Pops reflected that or was actually part of the cause.

Of course, Tony Dortie's finest hour came straight after the famous Nirvana performance where the camera panned out to Dortie who just ignored it completely and ploughed on announcing "James have a wicked new single out!".

I wonder if it was the same health problems which led to him having to leave with short notice in April 1991 (before he died a few month later) which kept him off the show for large portions of 1988 and 89?

And I wonder how the 1991 revamp would have gone if he hadn't left? I presume there'd still have been a revamp as I imagine the plans to move to Elstree would have been underway at the time he left. I know the change to making the revamp live vocal only happened at a very late stage and required some last minute changes to the set.

My own defining memory of the 1991 revamp- the realisation that some groups and artists were not very good singing live.

I too lost interest in TOTP by the early 90s, though I think this was not so much anything to do with the show's revamp, rather it was my feeling that the general quality of chart music in the early 90s was less to my taste.

There's no Thursday Sky at Night repeat this month (looks like this month's is an hour long live episode), so there's two episodes on the week of the 17th & 18th, including Liz Kershaw's only episode. With any luck there'll be no more skipped episodes in 1988. Still 4 more presenters to make their debut through the rest of 88- all female, which redresses the balance that there were no female presenters at all the first half of the year.

Doesn't look like there's any late night repeats for either of those episodes though!

Yeah, the only presenters to get a proper goodbye are probably the ones doing it when it was axed. And the final episode is unfortunately on the banned list, as they invited Savile back.

Peter Powell gets a proper goodbye- which as we'll see includes his future wife.

Also in 1994, Tony Dortie mentions it's his final show several times, but the following week Mark Franklin says nothing. I think Gary Davies says something on the final pre-revamp edition in 1991 too (of course, four of the other pre-revamp presenters came back in 1994).

Seems Andy Crane has no idea his episodes were due on BBC4 until someone pointed it out to him on Twitter this morning!

Really? I had no idea!

— Andy Crane (@andycrane64) October 3, 2019

The Story of 1988 showed several outtakes from the edition BBC4 showed last night (including Gary & Nicky messing around and Yazz having to stop mid-performance), obviously the unedited master tape for that one still survives. I wonder how many unedited tapes (whether regular or mute links) still survive? I presume the one for 21/3/85 (which BBC4 had to skip over because the master tape had gone missing) doesn't, otherwise they'd at least have made use of it for the clips in the Story of 1985 (or edited it down to the original episode, as they did on a few other occasions) at least rather than having to pull them from a VHS copy.