I had wondered if the new BBC Radio logos had launched to co-incide with the launch of Radio 5, but clearly not seeing as this was nearly 4 months before.
Well, they would probably started promoting Radio 5 around then so would have needed a logo. That was also around the time Radio 1's FM network was pretty much complete, I think the last major transmitter to be switched on was for the South Coast in May 1990 -
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/radio1/england/1990-05-24#at-15.00
The last of the Radio 2 FM simulcasts had come to an end in April 1990, and someone I know who lived in the area said that in between those ending and the new transmitter opening, they had to listen to the Top 40 on Radio Solent to hear it in FM.
After around 1997 they stopped having those first week of the year shows, probably because of these issues they always with having things to show.
I think that probably had more to do with the show being on the slide by that point, to be honest, and BBC1 taking the opportunity to shove something else on instead. I was always fascinated by the first shows in January, because it was such an odds and sods line-up. It's funny in that the first week of January is such a big telly-watching week, because nobody goes out and it's usually freezing, so it would probably be one of the most watched episodes of the year, but also by some distance the weakest.
Of course this was around the time the record companies got wise to the post-Christmas lull and started timing releases to take advantage of it, as most obviously illustrated this time next year with Iron Maiden. I had contrived to not hear the chart at all before that was announced as number one on the Pops, and I was amazed, the first record I can remember going to number one that I'd never heard of before it got there. It wasn't just the Maiden either, Queen's number one that month was very much a fanbase-only affair.
There was a famous example of that going wrong, mind, in 2001 when Steps released The Way You Make Me Feel on New Year's Day, clearly intending to benefit from being the only new record out and becoming a guaranteed number one, but some record shops couldn't be arsed putting it out on New Year's Day and selling it a few days early, meaning it entered the chart at number 72 the previous week, and then jumping to number two the week of its "official" release. Those few early copies seemingly made all the difference between number one and two. Which is a shame, as it's their best record by miles.
It's a bit of a shame that, while they were desperately scrabbling around for stuff to fill up that first show, they couldn't give the majestic When You Come Back To Me by Jason Donovan another spin given it was at number two, but that was because the pedantic rules at the time meant that any records that had gone down and then back up couldn't be played again unless it went higher the second time around, and it had already been at number two.
And you're also well into the era of songs entering high then falling down the chart, so, until the rules were rewritten again a few months later - January 1997 being the tail-end of Ric Blaxill as producer - a tough act to fill 30 minutes.
Ric Blaxill said that when he took over as producer in 1994 he assembled all the pluggers and gave them envelopes of "the new rules", and they were all empty, and he said there were no rules under him and they'd play whatever they liked if it worked. And the first time I remember a record being played that had gone down was under Blaxill, they played The Bomb by The Bucketheads when it was about number fifteen, having been in the top ten earlier, but it had hung around the charts for weeks.
There were then further plays of records going down during the period in spring 1997 between Blaxill and Cowey, when Mark Wells was producing for three months (an interesting period of the show, that, it changed quite a lot in terms of presentation during that spell), and then of course under Cowey it happened pretty much all the time. By those days a definition of a hit was one that fell down slowly rather than rose quickly, so it made sense. But playing the previous week's number one always looked weird, no matter how ofte they did it.
