Top Of The Pops = dead and gone

[Garfield And Friends]

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1802062,00.html

"
The show had been under pressure on several fronts, including the proliferation of 24-hour music channels and the decline of singles chart.
"

The rot really took a hold in the mid/early 90s methinks. Not a great loss given it's recent form/'format'. Still, a shame that its 60s/70s/80s success couldn't (and now won't) continue.

[Boing]

HAHAHAHA,good fucking riddance.TOTP died in the late eighties with its all new style of having some "radical" rad prick  off radio 1 that nobody had ever heard of presenting it in a ROCK!!! style.After that pop music just seemed to go down-fucking-hill and has been running behind pushing itself ever since.DIE TOTP,DIE DIE DIE.And take your stinking fucking music and bands with you.Amen.

[mothman]

Oh, grow up. You watched it just like everyone else, back in the day. The show was long past it but there was a time when it was the business. RIP.

[Boing]

Blah blah you watched it just like everyone else, back in the day.quote]

You just wanna shag Fearne Cotton.YOU grow up and fuck off.

[Ciarán2]

It's the reasoned debate that really makes Cookd and Bombd the treasure it is...

Well, I taped TOTP off the telly last week and no, it's not needed anymore, it won't really be missed. Except in that it was once great, but that was over 20 years ago really. I kind of think that, as was the story with Smash Hits, this demise could have been prevented, but there you go.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

One less vehicle for major labels whoring crap RnB videos. Good good.

[Go With The Flow]

You just wanna shag Fearne Cotton.

Why is that an insult?

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

You've not seen her recently then? She looks like she's been stapled to the underside of a milk float and speedbumped through Hull.

[Go With The Flow]

You've not seen her recently then?

Nope.

She looks like she's been stapled to the underside of a milk float and speedbumped through Hull.

...I guess that's a bad thing then.

[Borboski]

One of those girls that looks great until she opens her mouth and her eyes go REALLY WIDE so she CAN SAY everything THAT COMES OUT HER MIND.

hmm.

I'm really using capitals tonight.

[Boing]

You just wanna shag Fearne Cotton.

Why is that an insult?

No.That wasn't an insult.That was a statement of fact.I wanna shag Fearne Cotton too,despite what anyone else here says about her physical appearance or mental capacity.
YOU grow up and fuck off was,I think,the insult.

[The Mumbler]

Trying to make it trendy was the beginning of the end for Top Of The Pops.  The sheer variety - having Daniel O'Donnell and Happy Mondays on the same edition - was what made it work, a world in which rock groups, MOR singers and DJs occupied the same stage.  But kids don't really watch music TV with their parents anymore (as my generation did), and not that many people give a toss about the Top 40 either.

I've barely seen it since the disastrous 2003 relaunch, executive produced by Andi Peters and which hardly even addressed the charts.

[Glebe]

It became a bit embarrassing. The BBC is a stodgy old organisation....replacing The Simpsons with Dad's Army a few years back, for instance. And I mean, sure, there's probably too much Simpsons on, to be fair (I'm an enormous Simpsons fan, but still!), but I hate the way the BBC is always trumpeting Dad's Army. Maybe I'm going off topic a bit, but I do think it is an example of how out of touch they are. The whole image of the BBC is like the reprimanding old headmaster of television!

[Boing]

I've barely seen it since the disastrous 2003 relaunch, executive produced by Andi Peters and which hardly even addressed the charts.

Is that the same Andi Peters I'm thinking of,horrible effeminate little black man used to do the double act with the duck on kids TV?It must be.
GODAMMIT,and they wonder why society is falling apart.

[23 Daves]

I think it is the same Andi Peters, yes.  Perhaps it was the BBC's way of killing the show off.  "Give the job to that unemployed camp man over there, that'll make sure we can axe the show and get it off our hands in a couple of years time when nobody is watching anymore".

I still watch TOTP, for what it's worth.  The Sunday timeslot actually suited me better, but I have to be honest, I put it on out of habit, not any real enjoyment.  The concept has been lost these days - the show was always orientated around the charts but, as I've said before, these days it's whatever new releases a record company rep can convince them to play.  Hence you get shit like Morning Runner (who have never even had a Top 40 hit) and Kubb (who don't deserve to have, and might not have done if TOTP had just ignored them).  The feel that the show was about the "people's choice" and "the records you bought this week" had long since faded away.

I think it's sad.  They could have saved it and done something interesting with it.  They could have, if desperate for credibility, taken the old Chart Show approach of focussing on specialist charts.  Or booked an unsigned band every week.  Or had better guest presenters.  At least if these things hadn't worked and they'd crashed and burned as a result, it would have been better than the present situation where we're left with a show that tried nothing really daring and nobody watches anymore.

I'm going to be stabbing an effigy of Andi Peters with lit cigarettes tonight.

[The Mumbler]

It became a bit embarrassing. The BBC is a stodgy old organisation....replacing The Simpsons with Dad's Army a few years back, for instance. /quote]

They did that, though, because BBC1's showings of The Simpsons were being watched by fewer people than Sabrina The Teenage Witch on ITV.  Yeah, I know, who gives a toss about ratings?  The Beeb.  Obviously.

To be fair, the BBC seem to have reduced their default re-runs of Dad's Army, which really were rife in the mid-to-late 90s.  (And I like it, but...)  Is BBC2 still bunging on Some Mothers when there's a spare half-hour?

The worst thing TOTP ever did was to editorialise, whether it was to insist on live vocal performances (early 90s) or to start bowing to record company pressure.

[Jemble Fred]

There's no fucking excuse, it's just madness. You know FOR A FACT that they'll bring it back at some point in the next ten or twenty years (Jim'll Fix It's tipped for a return, for fuck's sake), just like they bring back every old format eventually. But in doing this they've just lost their record for the longest running music show in the world, and instead they'll launch some other shit pop show which may as well be called TOTP. At least if they's just, for instance, dropped the '2' from TOTP2 and run it occasionally on BBC3, they could have kept their record. It's all big empty gestures with the Beeb. Cunts, I tell you.

[PlasticTelephone]

Perhaps they could bring in Russell T Davies to give it a revamp or have it hosted by Ant & Dec or (and this might just work) have some decent fucking music on it. (God I'm sounding like the old fart I undoubtedly am.)

[23 Daves]

OK, I've read the news stories now, and the line that's seriously annoying me is the bog-standard blethering of: "Well of course, kids are into downloads now, and nobody cares about the charts anymore, so it was inevitable this would happen".

Sheer, unadulterated crap. For one thing, downloads are incorporated into the chart so this is an utterly meaningless excuse.  For quite another, number one hits still generate huge headlines - Nizlopi in December, and Sandi Thom this month.  It's of interest to a large number of people.

Top of the Pops lost its way not because people stop caring about music or physical singles, but because it became formatted within an inch of its life in the mid nineties and never found its way back.  The viewing figures also dropped around exactly the same time, way before the Internet or downloads really kicked in as a factor.

The show should have remained a pot pourri of what people bought the most of that week - novelty singles, Ibiza dance tracks, indie, metal, the works.  That's what made it compulsive viewing.  If you try to specialise the show too much or make it a giant NME special, it's inevitable that the viewing figures will plummet.

[Partridge's Love Child]

I've only ever had one real life encounter with Andi Peters.  After that incident, I've always viewed him as a massive cunt.

Oddly, I think the rot set in when it was still, presumably, winning good figures and the Beeb wanted it to be a flagship entertainment programme for the weekend.  Moving it from Thursday to Friday night meant that it was supposed to be the thing you watched before you went out, but in a world where we can all shove on MTV et al as our background Tarting Ourselves Up telly it never quite sat properly.  Thursday was such a strange day for it to be on which, conversely, aided its success as it was something you'd make an appointment to watch.  On a Friday at that time we want more disposable TV that we can flick and walk in and out of the room whilst doing something else.

[23 Daves]

I've only ever had one real life encounter with Andi Peters.  After that incident, I've always viewed him as a massive cunt.

I know it's nobody else's business, but would you mind elaborating?  At the moment, I'm in the mood for any anti-Andi Peters stories anyone has.

Oddly, I think the rot set in when it was still, presumably, winning good figures and the Beeb wanted it to be a flagship entertainment programme for the weekend.

Yes, and this was rightfully viewed as a huge mistake by most major figures in the music industry at the time.  The BBC are odd with things like this.  They'll have a flagship programme in the same slot for 30 years, then they'll move it and be surprised when people don't automatically follow.  Habits that have been entrenched since childhood are going to be enormously hard to break.

It's a standard media rule - if you're going to radically tamper with a launch date or a format of a long-established beast, you'd better know damn well what you're doing and have solid reasons for doing so.  The irony is people very seldom do.  Most revamps, relaunches and slot changes are the death knell for otherwise perfectly solid, established ideas.

[mothman]

"You just wanna shag Fearne Cotton, YOU fuck off and grow up." Amazing. I couldn't have hoped for a better post to underline how infantile Boing's original post was. He'll be telling me his dad's bigger than my dad next.

[Jemble Fred]

They'd do best to just hire some cheap slappers who can dance a bit and make every show a half-hour of pervy dancing to current hit singles. Without even a presenter. Cheap as chips.

I do find it amusing that the likes of Dave Lee Travis are saying 'well it's run its course'. I bet that cunt thought the show had run its course when they told him he'd never be back to present it. As if DLT or Jimmy Saville are going to have any interest in the show surviving... without them. Noel Edmonds, whose career is going noticeably better, got right to the point about why it's a fucking stupid idea to get rid of it – it's a world famous BRAND of over forty years' standing. You could call any music show TOTP and it'd be worth it, to keep the brand alive.

Also – why didn't they try to put it on before Doctor Who (another perfect example of a brand that was considered dead, before its time)? That could have worked wonders.

[23 Daves]

Noel Edmonds, whose career is going noticeably better, got right to the point about why it's a fucking stupid idea to get rid of it – it's a world famous BRAND of over forty years' standing. You could call any music show TOTP and it'd be worth it, to keep the brand alive.

Yes, it's a strange day indeed when you find yourself vehemently agreeing with Noel Edmunds.

And to be honest, the TOTP of today barely resembles the old format.  True, they always play the number one and they show the top tens, but other than that it's not strictly speaking a chart show anymore.  Anyone can get on if they have a new release out, which was taboo back in the old days.  Plus, on one of the shows a few weeks back, they just showed a bunch of live bands playing at some event, which had bugger all to do with anything going on in the top 40.  If that's how flexible the programme is now, surely they could do what they wanted to it to keep the name alive?  It's a rum decision indeed.

Also – why didn't they try to put it on before Doctor Who (another perfect example of a brand that was considered dead, before its time)? That could have worked wonders.

They could do lots of things to save the programme - move it to BBC3, turn it into a video-only programme, get decent guest presenters who people would tune in especially for, etc. etc.... the feeling I've got over the last couple of years is that, for whatever reason, the BBC bigwigs actually wanted the thing to die.  Strange, as I can't imagine it costing that much money to run.

[Hans Resist]

I'm surprised they didn't think of shunting it off to its own cheapo TOTP digital channel where they could (presumably) play videos, have fund-raising text-ins if they insist on being non-commercial, let the interchangeable haircut bands have an evening show, run archive stuff (entire shows from the 70s/80s as well as TOTP2 compilations), download charts, round and round. It's where Smash Hits went to die, so it can't be that hard to run. And if that eventually failed then nobody would care anyway.

It will come back in some form.

[VegaLA]

Whooaa. What happened there ? Last I heard it was being broadcast on a Friday evening on BBC1, sounds like they've really messed it around in recent years.
Well i'm sad to see it go, despite the fact I've not seen it in years. It was a great show to see your fave bands lipsync to their latest offering. I've got tapes of performances of various groups from the mid 80s to the mid 90s.
Your'll all be sorry come Christmas day !

[23 Daves]

I'm surprised they didn't think of shunting it off to its own cheapo TOTP digital channel where they could (presumably) play videos, have fund-raising text-ins if they insist on being non-commercial, let the interchangeable haircut bands have an evening show, run archive stuff (entire shows from the 70s/80s as well as TOTP2 compilations), download charts, round and round. It's where Smash Hits went to die, so it can't be that hard to run. And if that eventually failed then nobody would care anyway.

Well I think they're sitting a goldmine personally.  Didn't TOTP2 get 3m viewers at its peak?

In fact, a BBC Music Digital channel would make an enormous amount of sense from both a financial and quailty point of view.  You've got to wonder why they don't get cracking on it.

[Cack Hen]

This will very blatantly be back. Absence makes the heart etc.

[rudi]

It's the reasoned debate that really makes Cookd and Bombd the treasure it is...

If you keep feeding the Boing he won't go away...

On a Friday at that time we want more disposable TV that we can flick and walk in and out of the room whilst doing something else.

That's why I liked it on a Friday - you could put it on in the living room and the kitchen and potter about winding down/up, cooking, drinking, bathing etc without having to be sat watching it.

[Pinball]

Trust the Beeb to waste such a valuable brand...