Top of the Pops

Along with the casual homophobia, on a forum devoted to the famously entirely heterosexual world of eighties pop.

So pleased we've reached the Cypher graphics era, I absolutely loved them at the time. The other show I remember using them, and watching it almost entirely for them, was Noel's Addicts (the series only remembered now for being parodied by Reeves and Mortimer). Such a shame The Day Today then arrived to make them all look ridiculous.

I think it's the first set of graphics that in terms of the font and the animation actually look quite modern and could be used today, the chart looks particularly handsome in this form I think. There were huge leaps forward technically in television around the late eighties and early nineties, to the extent that stuff from this era looks less obviously "old". I always mention watching TV Hell in 1992 and a lot of the programmes like Triangle and Minipops looked absolutely ancient, even though they were only a decade old, because technically they left a lot to be desired as well and things had progressed so quickly in the early nineties. Nowadays obviously they're in 4:3 SD and the fashions have changed but if you were to look at Pops from twenty or 25 years ago, it would look quite contemporary in terms of its production.



Yes, I do enjoy listening to Gary on Sounds of the 80s, he seems a really nice guy and a proper pro. I really liked it on The Story of 1990 when Orbital really wanted to emphasise what a lovely guy he was, certainly he was clearly genuinely interested in music unlike some of his colleagues.

I think Gary got lumbered with the Smashie and Nicey tag partly because he was so associated with the Radio 1 Roadshow and the welly boot sticker-era, and also as mentioned in The Nation's Favourite, when he was dropped he did an interview with The Independent and, as Radio 1's Head of PR mentions in the book, he came across as "quite stupid" and it was actually a bit of an asset to Radio 1 because he was probably a bit too late to the party and by that point the public were going "Not another DJ who's been got rid of moaning to the papers, how undignified", which was a shame for Gary.

As I said before, the show now probably most resembles what it did circa 1979 in that there's a small number of presenters alternating (in 79 Jensen, Powell, Read, Savile and Travis did pretty much every show that year between them), it's not really changed much in recent years, it's sort of running itself and every show is quite similar, and also there are lots of memorable performances, but they often seem to be memorable in spite of the show, as it struggles to cope with dance music as much as it struggled to cope with new wave a decade earlier. So it does seem like it's treading water just waiting for a revamp. Though it's a hugely fondly remembered period for me.

It was interesting to hear the 26/01 show still had stereo audio - I think I'm right in saying they didn't do a simulcast on R1 that week or the following one as a result of TOTP getting moved to Friday, so they easily could've just not bothered. According to a post on missing-episodes.com, it was still a bit of a hassle to not record in mono at TV Centre even after they gained the means to do so, so unless some of the difficulties were sorted by 1990 I wonder why they saw it fit.

Would still have gone out in stereo in some of the areas with experimental NICAM transmissions.

One thing that stands out about Gary Davies is that (as it says in The Radio Companion) he did champion quite a lot of music originating in mainland Europe, perhaps surprisingly for someone with such mid-Atlantic delivery. There is, or was, a YouTube clip where he's even playing a French-language song. He was also the first to play Radiohead (!) when he had been moved to weekend breakfast, although clearly the late-night Sunday show was far too AOR/soft-rock for where Bannister was taking the station.

I remember Mark Goodier being described by, I think, Andy Parfitt, as a solid midfielder.

He's never been a star DJ. However, he has proved to be very reliable for the stations he's worked for and able to adapt to different audiences and time slots.

Yes, Matthew Bannister says that in The Nation's Favourite, saying he wasn't a star forward or a dull defender but he was an incredibly competent presenter, certainly with more personality than most, and he was genuinely interested in music and in radio, and I would agree with that. On Pops he can sometimes come across as a bit eager to please but I used to listen to him a lot, especially in the mid-nineties when he was on drivetime, and I've always liked him.



Yes, I was watching an old Going Live where Mark Goodier and Johnny Beerling were in the Press Conference discussing the future of Radio 1, and Goodier is eager to point out how much Gary Davies did in discovering and championing new music. Of course while he wasn't on the radio he was still working in the music industry in publishing and artist management for new artists, so he's clearly genuinely interested in music and wasn't just on the radio because he liked the sound of his own voice.

Funnily enough there's also a bit in The Nation's Favourite about a record we're going to hear quite a bit of in the next few weeks, Nothing Compares 2 U, because the plugger talks about how he was getting no interest at all from Radio 1 until Simon Bates' producer heard it, and Bates immediately went on air and said "This, loves, is a number one record!" and played it non-stop.

Notice they're using the 'clean' copies of previous editions for repeat performances.

You can even spot the original caption animating on the projection screens in the studio - while a different Cypher graphic does its thing.

I've mentioned this before. The use of "clean" copies seemed to come in towards the end of 1987, before then you could sometimes see awkward attempts to cover up captions from the previous edition. You Win Again was probably the last notable one, with big white blocks covering up the "Chart Entry" caption from the original showing, whereas a couple of months later they repeated a performance of China In Your Hand without the original caption being there.

The two episodes from 1988 that didn't get shown because the BBC seemingly only have mute links copies don't have captions, as the BBC archive copies that leaked onto the internet show. Though Big Hits 1988 did show the Eurythmics performance from one of those episodes with the original captions which means that episode must exist at least partially as-broadcast (someone did suggest on another forum that the BBC do actually have the complete PasB version, but someone at BBC4 got confused because they still have the mute links version too and thought that was the only one, but I don't know if that's the case).

As was pointed out on here as well, both the BBC4 and UK Gold showed the 1/6/89 edition without captions, so that presumably must be the only version of that (live) episode that got recorded.

I wonder how many of these mute link/caption free versions still exist? Quite often on TOTP2 you can see how they've had to zoom in or cut away to avoid showing the original captions, and I presume they'd use the clean versions of the performances if they existed. Though I have seen a few occasions where they've clearly had access to clean copies.

If those 1988 mute link editions were anything to go by, the clean copy of the shows should've always been missing both the link audio and captions - so I wonder if the captions but not the links were recorded to what was meant to be the PasB version, and vice versa, so the clean copy with the links was the only one saved in the end.

That show was also in mono instead of stereo, which has been the case with a few others recently. Clips of 4/8 and 25/8/88 shown on TOTP2 proved them to be another couple of shows recorded in it before the simulcast launch the following month, but both were noticeably mixed down to mono for the repeat.

22/12 and 22/6/89 were then mono too, ditto the first 8 minutes of 31/8/89, which was another live edition. I think I'm right in saying 31/8 and 1/6 are down to the wrong audio feed getting recorded to tape, as they were both live, but clips of 22/6 and 22/12 have indeed been in stereo when shown on TOTP2. I find it hard to believe the stereo audio could easily be lost, so this is probably on whoever waves these repeats through for broadcast.

Presumably their label initially thought they'd easily beat Rui Da Silva though.

They actually ended up 14,000 copies behind though, so that early leak of Steps didn't make any difference.

From memory a song that did lose out from an early leak was Puretone‘s Addicted to Bass the following year, which if you add the leaked sales to the following week’s #2 position it would have outsold whatever was #1. Even more impressive when you consider that the song was four years old by then and had been a hit in Australia ages ago, although the UK release was a remix I think.