The demise of Top Of The Pops last month after 42 years should have surprised absolutely no one. Like any national institution the show remained a throwback to an altogether quainter era.
First broadcast in 1964 from a converted church during the age of micro-communication, TOTP was launched by the BBC in a hackneyed attempt to catch the rising beatnik comet. Like any show ever made by the BBC before This Life in 1996, TOTP was an awful programme presented by truly awful people. Yet in its heyday during the 1970s it attracted average weekly viewing figures of 15 million. Those are figures for which any terrestrial TV company today would gladly kill. In the 1970s, however, the UK could boast just 3 channels. These days it is a whole new world of fragmented mass information competing for the attention of tiny teenage minds. The people in charge of TOTP just did not understand the 21st century.
Personally I think Kurt Cobain killed TOTP. Nirvana played their Smells Like Teen Spirit single on the show in November 1991. Kurt deliberately under-sang the song so slowly and badly that producers threatened to axe the taped performance altogether and replace it with rehearsal footage. Two weeks previously the band had played the same song live on Channel 4’s The Word with all the primal wind-rush and angst of the original. Kurt thanked Courtney Love for being “the best fuck in the world” and jumped into Dave Grohl’s drum kit. It was a legendary performance. In direct contrast Kurt knew that TOTP was utterly irrelevant to Nirvana’s inevitable rise to stardom. The BBC – missing the point of the band entirely and completely disconnected from their audience – chose to look elsewhere for more compliant pop puppets and so began TOTP’s long, graceless decline. Good.
Middle-aged broadsheet critics have been quick to blame the death of TOTP on the quality of today’s pop music. This is a nonsense and instead reflects the critics own sorry state of very dull existence. Pop music has and always will be more important than life or death. You cannot say that pop music doesn’t matter. It has always been the very air that teenagers breathe. Some of us have never given up hope even when we should know better. A stupid song is for Christmas but pop music is for life. TOTP, however, was never really nasty enough to catch the zeitgeist. Ever since its re-launch in 2003 with Andi Peters at the helm, the show has been of no interest to anyone over the age of 6 or under 60. Despite the best efforts of successive controllers, producers and presenters, TOTP always remained a novelty children’s programme.
Prior to 1981, however, the show had enjoyed a unique market monopoly for nearly 20 years. As a result it became a compulsory promotional platform for even the laziest and most reclusive pop stars. Girlschool’s Kim McAuliffe remembers the show with nothing but affection. The world’s longest-surviving all-girl rock band played TOTP three times in the very early ‘80s – once alongside Motorhead in 1981 and again on their own in 1982 with Hit & Run. Typically Kim can’t remember the third.
“It was a huge show back then,” she says. “Enormous. Everybody played it and everybody wanted to play it. It was something to tell your mum and dad about and the whole family would sit down and watch us on TV. It was a fun thing to do to prove to people that the band actually existed and that all the money we’d borrowed hadn’t been totally in vain.
“I remember drinking in the backstage Green Room with people like Adam Ant and Spandau Ballet and all those beautiful pop boys. Ha! There are some disgraceful stories from that Green Room!”
TOTP was a huge success because it had no competition. When Warners and American Express launched MTV in August 1981, however, pop music changed forever. MTV could now deliver pop stars direct to our living rooms 24 hours a day. The idea of a weekly, 30 minute pop show presented by ridiculous Radio 1 jocks was immediately obsolete. TOTP never fully recovered.
The show also never really adapted to changing musical climates until it was too late. Whilst Channel 4’s brand new Tube was getting spikey and mischevious up in Newcastle with Jools Holland and Muriel Grey, TOTP was hiring a scantily-clad dance troupe called Zoo to cover the gaps in the studio schedule. Ironically, such cornball troupes as Zoo, Legs & Co, Ruby-Flip and particularly Pans People will probably prove to be the show’s fondest legacy. After endlessly tinkering with the theme tune, graphics and format throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, viewing figures began to collapse. When ITV launched CD-UK in 1998 and Channel 4 trumped the Noughties with the fantastically acerbic Popworld, less than 1 million were tuning into TOTP.
The programme has disappeared for the same reason that Smash Hits magazine was axed by EMAP back in February. Perfectly-packaged pop is no longer enough. The digital age has offered instant worldwide exposure to more underground acts than ever before and jumping through hoops on a TV talent show is no longer seen as an acceptable route to infamy. The carefully-controlled and stage-managed careers of pops’ frothy frontline now no longer appeals to a generation that can only spell the word A.S.B.O. The success of Mike Skinner, Sandi Thom, Gnarls Barkley, Arctic Monkeys and even Gorrilaz is proof that pop stars are at least pretending to think for themselves. The likes of Myspace and YouTube now means that absolutely anybody can have a go.
Digital downloads are now included in the weekly figures provided by the Official UK Charts Company and yet we still bought nearly 30 million CD albums in the shops during the first 3 months of 2006. Contrary to rumour it is now a boom time. TOTP should be ashamed of itself for failing to realise that pop will never eat itself.
CHRIS WATTS
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