Top of the Pops

The 6-year-old me was confused watching the "Let's Work" edition at a song being at Number 41 on a show which focused on the Top 40, not knowing there were 35 further positions published in Music Week.

There's an edition from 1991 where there's two songs outside the Top 40 in the line-up - Marillion at 42 and Northside at 41. The chart position is shown on the caption for each track.

I also remember a couple of songs in the 41-50 area of the chart appearing on TOTP at the start of the Ric Blaxill era: a Roachford song which climbed into the 40 the following Sunday, and a Sinead O'Connor track which didn't. IIRC neither caption showed the chart position.

Uploaded the All Seeing I performance:



This video shows one of the other things I don't like about the Chris Cowey era- Jamie Theakston practically every week. Apart from when Dortie & Franklin were the only presenters, and when Jimmy Savile & Tony Blackburn were the only presenters in 1970 I don't think one presenter dominated as much as he did up until that point, sometimes he could be presenting 2, 3 4 or even on a couple of occasions 5 weeks in a row. Even Dortie & Franklin and Savile & Blackburn alternated during the time they were the only presenters. Until it ended up being Tim Kash as permanent presenter, then Fearne Cotton and/or Reggie Yates every week after he left.

Yes, and I vividly remember this because the previous Sunday I remember the papers reporting the imminent revamp of Pops, and that they'd be including records outside the Top 40. Then on the Thursday they had those two records on it and, idiot I was, assumed that rule had already started, rather than it just being a coincidence that there were so few acts available to come into the studio they had to venture outside the Top 40.

There were a couple of occasions in the Michael Hurll era of the eighties we had records from outside the Top 40 on the show - we had Wang Chung in 1984 appearing at number 42. Funnily enough in the Metro today there's an interview with Kim Appleby where she says their big break was getting on Top of the Pops while they were only at number 44 because Boy George had pulled out, which is a nice story, but as Popscene points out, they were actually at number 24.

It was far more common in the seventies, some of the shows from 1976 had all kinds of obscurities that never even got in the Top 75, let alone the Top 40, like the majestic Glamourpuss.



Yes, although in 1987 we won't see four consecutive episodes because Mike Smith presented them all. That said, that was when The Roxy was on and they had the same presenters every week (I remember there was a suggestion that audience research said they didn't like rotating presenters) and so Pops did the same thing with Smith and Davies every week for four weeks. Actually Gary Davies does a load over the next few years, I think there's another period in 1987 when he does about five in a row, some solo and some as a double act.

The thing about the presenters in the Cowey era is that they were all very clearly delivering the same Cowey-penned scripts, you got to recognise his various turns of phrase and no matter who was hosting the links all sounded the same, it was probably the era where the presenters got to exhibit their individual personalities the least. That was the problem to me with Pops in those days, it was very repetitive and predictable, what with the repeated performances and the links, and because everything was pre-recorded, everything interesting had already appeared in the papers before it was on the telly.

Ah, possibly my favourite edition of TOTP ever! Though I suppose you could almost call it 'Top of the Rocks', rather than Top of the Pops...

I always really appreciated the increased amount of rock and indie bands that came on the show during his era, and before that, under Ric Blaxill - though I am probably somewhat biased in that regard, being a fan of that sort of music - and I especially liked how a lot of these bands played live (IIRC, Muse, who were basically regulars during that era, would nearly always play live).



I agree - I think that was a big problem with the Cowey era - it all felt a bit samey, especially towards the end. I think what made it worse was that we'd come from a period of having guest hosts every week: some good, some not so good, but always entertaining, IMO. I said this earlier in the thread but Dennis Pennis remains my favourite guest host, treating the acts with utter contempt.

Another takeaway from that period, to me at least, was that at times it very much felt pieced together, almost like a clip show, because as you said, a lot of the perfomances were pre-recorded (often at one of the European TOTP studios) and slotted in. And I do think the StarBar was awful - it added nothing to the show, IMO, and ate into valuable music time. That being said, I do think Cowey had some great ideas, especially taking the show international, and expanding the TOTP brand massively - and in any case, even the worst shows of his era were miles ahead of Andi Peters' reign...

It's also worth noting that the German version of TOTP would show songs from within the whole of the top 100 - it wasn't unusual to see tracks at say, number 50 being shown (below is a Kylie performance, from a week where she was at number 47) - which I think gave it more variety than our version, and solved the problem of there being so many repeated performances from week to week.



As for inventive performances, my favourite TOTP performance has to be this, from early 2003:



EDIT: Fun factoid I've just found out: the French version of TOTP was the only one not to use the singles chart - instead, it used the album chart, the reason being that it was considered more relevant to the audience of France 2.

At least one thing about that All Seeing I performance is they were actually in the studio with Jamie and you have the camera pull away and you see him in the background, so there's at least that sense of occasions. The obvious problem was in that era usually half or even more of what you were seeing was either repeated from a previous show or recorded weeks (if not months) earlier when the act had a couple of hours to spare to get to Elstree, and there wouldn't have even been a presenter in the studio. It was virtually a clip show in that era.

The face that showing the same song on consecutive weeks and when they were dropping (sometimes quite heavily- featuring last week's number one which has now dropped to Number 9 really is pretty stupid) were regular occurances in the Cowey era when both of those things were big no-nos for pretty much all of the show's run was not a good thing either. As I already said, clearly a consequence of Cowey's refusal to show videos but clearly not being able to get enough acts to perform to not have to repeat songs or show fallers as a result.

I've watched my dad watch it on BBC Four.

Bit strange on last night's show how they showed Grace Jones as a "breaker", even though she'd been a breaker the previous week (surely you can't break into the chart twice, and only risen 5 places, so not even a significant climber), and they showed it in full, not just a clip. On the previous show, they all showed Phantom Of The Opera in full even though it was a breaker too.

Also interesting this week has been the biggest fall for a Number 1 in history, for Three Lions, by a significant amount, from 1 to 97 (the previous biggest drop was to 29). Not suprising I guess as people would have stopped buying it as soon as England got kicked out the world cup.

Here’s the raw footage of David Bowie’s unaired performance of ‘Time will crawl’ from 1987. Interesting to see the stuff before and after the performance.

Very interesting video. Sounds to me as though a recording of audience cheering/applause is played in just before the performance starts. Also sounds to me as though at least some of the instruments are live as they sound different to the single - but obviously a pre-recorded vocal.