“Yes, it’s Top of the Pops with today eleven top acts!” Six months on from Richard Skinner’s first solo hosting gig and Operation Make Skinner Look Less Like A Newsreader And More Like A Human Being is finally seeing some … read more
Hey everyone, let’s play “good news / bad news”! The good news is, after missing a huge chunk of musical history due to presenters’ off-screen activities and someone’s inability to record a live programme for the archive, BBC Four viewers … read more
If you had fond memories of late April and early May 1981 and were looking forward to reliving those memories via the BBC Four reruns of Top of the Pops, you’re probably feeling pretty short changed by now. What with … read more
That idea of showing two editions of TOTP a week on consecutive nights seemed great at the start of the year. Quickly, though, we ran into problems due to the, shall we say, unavailability of certain episodes. Miss out a … read more
By this stage of the BBC Four reruns the audience has formed itself into two distinct groups. One one hand there’s the casual viewer who isn’t really following the timeline but will greet every deviation from the norm – anything … read more
For all Michael Hurll’s efforts in dragging Top of the Pops kicking and screaming into the ’80s and turning it into a dazzling celebration of pop music instead of a dreary light entertainment show, he keeps coming up against one … read more
There’s an almighty gap in the BBC Four reruns here as we skip three whole episodes, starting with this Dave Lee Travis-fronted edition. No doubt the Daily Mail would be disgusted to realise that people ever watched it on its … read more
“Hi.” Hi yourself, Peter Powell, in your monogrammed shirt, white blazer with the sleeves rolled up and, let’s not beat about the bush here, beige slacks. Powell seems to have taken on the mantle of “senior presenter” of TOTP recently, … read more
“Welcome to Top of the Pops! Some 19 million people every week tune in to see some of the top acts of 1981 on this show!” That’s what Mike Read tells us, and as one of the co-authors of the … read more
Another week, another two editions of TOTP on BBC Four as we attempt to crack on through the whole year before the Proms, the Olympics and whatever else has been displaced by the closure of BBC Three as a linear … read more
So it seems Richard Skinner wasn’t in Scotland all week with the other Radio 1 DJs, as the Radio Times seems to suggest. Although his evening show was billed as including sessions from Scottish bands, he must have been in … read more
So the industrial dispute we were pretending wasn’t happening last week has been resolved, the audience has been allowed back out of the tiny airless booths from where they were encouraged to cheer and applaud in sound only, and everything’s … read more
