A lost cause

Wailing and gnashing of teeth appear not to have greeted the news that Top of the Pops is to end after 42 glorious years. Indeed, as far as I can see, no one gives a monkey’s. I have to admit, I am disappointed. Of all those newspaper columnists with nothing to write about, you would have thought at least one would have embraced the cause. And where are the elderly pop-pickers hoisting banners outside Television Centre and brandishing tear-stained photos of Jimmy Savile? Instead, public reaction has been muted and resigned, and possibly tempered by surprise that the show was still going on at all. BBC2, did you say? Early Sunday evenings? It is so definitively not the time to be watching pop music on television that we can only assume the schedulers put it there on purpose, to let it expire quietly and away from the public gaze. Every so often I would tune in by mistake, witness the brittle stage-school teens now hosting the show and turn over to something else in a hurry. No one likes to see a beloved old show in its death throes. Somehow it’s just not…seemly.

It may also be that, right now, indifference is more palatable than full-blooded nostalgia. Sooner or later this will surely change. Almost everyone has their own ‘golden age of pop’ (which started when they were about 14 and ended when they were about 22), and Top of the Pops was at the centre of them all. That’s simply because it was always there, on a Thursday on BBC1, usually hosted by a Radio One DJ, in the days when that title actually meant something, and was afforded universal respect and frequently honoured in the Pipe Smoker of the Year awards.

And we all watched the show because we understood and appreciated the ruthless simplicity of the format. If a song had gone up in the charts that week, it might be played. If a song had gone down in the charts, it wouldn’t be played. At the end there would be a chart rundown in reverse and the number one record would be played, whether we liked it or not. This rigidity of format gave the show a wonderful randomness: after David Bowie singing ‘Heroes’ as though the world was about to end, it would probably be the Barron Knights, or maybe Neil Diamond’s latest toe-curler. Notions of cool were irrelevant; the primacy of the top 40 was absolute. Sir Keith Joseph must have approved. This was the first wholly market-led popular TV show, decades ahead of its time. Now we have a wholly market-led world, whether we like it or not, and TOTP is no more.

What did for it is what does for many old shows: change for the sake of change. New producers would arrive, keen to stamp their dismal little personalities on the format, and something would always be lost. Hey, let’s have a section for album tracks, or for the latest cool unsigned band. In other words, let’s control the show more. Let’s erode it. Let’s put it on Friday evening against Coronation Street. When fearful TV executives lose confidence in it, even the most venerable and respected programme is doomed.

At the same time, the pop world had shifted. Back in the 1970s the singles chart may have been daft but we all essentially trusted it. Sure, we knew that record companies tried to subvert it to their own ends, but that was their job, and we accepted that. Even when The Sex Pistols were denied number one in 1977 for ‘God Save The Queen’ — an obvious and pathetic piece of chicanery — we recognised that this was mainly to avoid the terrible embarrassment of having Top of the Pops play the song at the end of the show. People would be watching. It couldn’t happen. But in the 1990s record companies learnt new tricks and overpowered the singles chart. No longer did songs gradually rise up the chart on something vaguely approaching merit. Now they were played on the radio for weeks before release, came straight in at number one and then slowly slid away. The market had been skewed by sharp practice, consumers lost interest, the integrity of the chart was compromised. Top of the Pops could not survive this as well.

Pop music, though, isn’t going to go away, and as fans of Mastermind, University Challenge and Doctor Who know, great TV formats are too rare to waste. I have a feeling we will see something like it again, and, if the original format is reinstated, we may willingly watch it as well. Next week: the return of Watch With Mother; and can Eldorado be far behind?