Top of the Pops

ISTR an entire closing link was cut out of a 1987 episode because of the usual Mike Smith mention, so that at least should go to show it isn't deemed too awkward to do that. Or they'll just cut the ending off of the show entirely, of course, as consistency understandably hasn't always been a priority with these repeats.

R Kelly reference *and* 'You Are Not Alone' kept intact in BBC Four's showing of the Christmas TOTP from 1995.

EDIT: According to the same show, Mike Flowers Pops had the Christmas Number 1 with his take on 'Wonderwall'.

Except it was really 'Earth Song' by MJ, the video of which played out the programme as broadcast.

Nice to see they went to the trouble of filming multiple endings as far back as 25 years ago.

That's interesting, they must have made multiple versions,,, and BBC4 picked the non-broadcast one.

Here's the as-broadcast ending of the episode:



I'm presuming this is the first time the Mike Flowers Pops performance has been broadcast, unless it's turned up on TOTP2 at some point.

Mike Flowers was the number 1 in Scotland that year, although presumably they didn’t go as far to actually air that alternate version up there.

https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/scottish-singles-chart/19951224/41/

When I was in the audience for the 2016 Christmas special they filmed several different takes announcing the #1, and impressively even included the then-outsider chance of the current #1 that week (Clean Bandit’s Rockabye, also live in the studio) still being the case at Christmas, which despite the odds it was when the show went out.

Wouldn’t it have been from a previous episode? They didn’t pan the camera to it, suggesting it was reused.

EDIT: I wonder how many endings they recorded?! Mike Flowers Wonderwall was at 9 that week, and it had been at 11 the previous week with MJ still at number 1. Didn’t seem that likely Wonderwall would make it to number 1. It had peaked at 2 a few weeks earlier, just like the Oasis original.

Does this mean then that all Michael Jackson performances will be edited out? This includes massive hits like Black or White and Remember the Time, the videos for which were long and were shown in full on their first airing.

You're mistaken – they did pan the camera from Björk to Mike Flowers.



Mike Flowers made a sudden assault on the charts – and had a large amount of Radio 1 airplay that week – thanks to a sustained prank by Chris Evans.

In a "world exclusive" revelation on the Breakfast Show, Evans said he'd been sent an obscure 1960s recording of Wonderwall which proved plagiarism by Oasis, and said that he wanted the original writers/performers to get the justice they deserved, so he made Mike Flowers' Wonderwall the record of the week.

In a pre-interweb age, people couldn't find out the truth. Everyone at my workplace fell for Evans' prank.

ISTR that Simon Mayo and Nicky Campbell happily played along with Evans' prank whenever they introduced the Flowers version of Wonderwall on their own Radio 1 shows.



This wasn't a case of BBC censorship of Michael Jackson – they showed "You Are Not Alone" (and a message by MJ to TOTP viewers) earlier in the same episode.

They've shown this alternative ending by mistake, or maybe to give us a little treat.

I think you're looking at the chart positions of the Oasis version rather than Mike Flowers? The Mike Flowers Pops version was a new entry at number 2 on the chart announced on the 24th December: https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart/19951224/7501/

Considering they obviously produced at least two fully edited versions of this edition of TOTP, rather than just dropping in the appropriate clip into the edit once the number 1 was known, one wonders just how many more complete versions of this programme are sitting in the archives?!

Chris Evans might have given it the push towards the top that it needed, but Kevin Greening was the first who started the 'original version' practical gag on his weekend Breakfast show a month or so before the other Radio DJ's joined in the prank on the country.

I noticed that in the episode from 24 May 1990, the names of an artist and song title (The Power - Snap) were transposed on the chart countdown text/graphics. Does this happen often?

Yes because now we have the internet, there is no disinformation whatsoever! Ahem.

I believe even Noel Gallagher himself got asked by the record company if he actually wrote the song as a result.