BY PAUL T HORGAN
In a way, Jimmy Savile was responsible for Top of the Pop‘s persistence and success in its heyday, which I suggest to be the 1970s and 1980s. In an era of three-channel analogue television, it was strange to me that ITV never produced a competing peak-time programme in those decades using the same formula of bands miming along to their charting single in front of an audience of adolescents and teenagers. Instead the commercial channel had a smattering of short-lived series that occasionally featured bands miming in an empty studio, as well as some regional offerings.
In retrospect the reason was obvious. Had the antics of the Peroxide Paedophile or someone like him taken place in the corridors and backstage rooms of a business that depended on audience share and revenue from advertisers rather than a household tax, the ensuing scandal would have resulted in boycotts leading to the business’s closure, no matter how many years had passed since the crimes. We saw this when the News of the World shut down a week after it emerged that the newspaper had organised the hacking of the voicemail of a high-profile victim of a serial killer nine years previously, with some staff members and contractors jailed. By contrast the only real casualty of the Savile scandal was the BBC’s Director-General and that was only over the cover-up rather than the scandal itself, and he enjoyed an over-generous payoff. As in all state-run organisations, the actual blame was diluted and deferred, with managers merely being reassigned, rather than dismissed, or held legally or morally culpable.
So Top of the Pops had, for the worst of reasons, an effective monopoly on its format of permitting audiences to see their favourite bands other than in photographs. It was standard for millions of households to congregate at the television every Thursday evening to see what was the most popular music of the week. The dads would be there to see dance troupe Pan’s People or their more explicit successors cavorting to an uptempo melody. The programme regularly featured in the top 10 most-watched programmes of the week, gathering audiences of about 10 million. It is reasonable to state that almost every child of school age watched the programme regularly.
The format of the show, while successful for good or ill, did not lend itself to memorable or iconic performances. In fact the restrictions of a small stage in a television studio might explain why bands used outlandish costumes to appear distinctive, certainly in the 1970s Glam era. Of the two decades’ output, however, there were probably three performances that could reasonably be described as iconic, in that they resonated well beyond the viewing of the actual programme.
The first was Roxy Music’s debut performance of Virginia Plain in August 1972 :
The song itself was a cut above the other fare with sophistication in both lyrics and composition. While the performance itself may seem pedestrian and the camerawork routine, the appearance of the band was eclectic, appropriating the style of glam rock but elevating it to a higher plane, the band members clad in exotic outfits which appeared curated. It did not demand attention through energy or brashness in contrast to the simplistic antics of Gary Glitter or Roy Wood of Wizzard. The performance’s iconic status is confirmed by not one, but two homages decades later.
Big Train was a surreal 1990s sketch show from the writers of Father Ted, featured a dying Mao Tse-Tung conveyed from his deathbed to take the place of Byran Ferry at the upright piano:
The sketch is played entirely straight and the only real change is Mao, played by the always excellent Kevin Eldon, intoning the lyrics in a Cantonese accent.
The comedy panel show Shooting Stars also made homage with Vic Reeves in the Ferry role:
It is played for laughs, with Johnny Vegas taking on the role of Brian Eno struggling with cobbled-together gadgetry.
The performance of Sparks’ This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us in June 1974 was distinctive and memorable, but for reasons apparently unintended by the band. While the song had, like Virginia Plain, a level of sophistication above the plodding output of contemporary bands like Slade and Mud, the outstanding feature was the appearance of the lead singer Russell Mael’s brother Ron, who played keyboards. Clad in a plain shirt and tie and looking more like an accounts clerk in an office than a pop musician, he was sporting a Hitler moustache!
The effect was that, rather than focus on Russell as the lead singer, as would be normal, the camera concentrated on Ron as he looked increasingly irritated from all the attention he was taking from his brother.
The image certainly resonated with Paul McCartney. In his video for his single Coming Up, he dons numerous disguises to play historic rock and pop performers, including Ron Mael, albeit with more ambivalent moustachery:
McCartney’s Ron Mael captures the spirit of original’s exasperation, and cannot help but catch the eye amongst all the other homages on show.
Sparks are still going strong. In recent years they have teamed up with Franz Ferdinand to form a group called FFS. Sparks’ most recent single, The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte, was released a few weeks ago. The video featured the brothers with actress Cate Blanchett dancing to their music:
The final iconic performance is not by a miming band. Shalamar’s 1982 song A Night to Remember is not in and of itself memorable, being standard early-1980s disco-fare. Instead of having the band pretend to sing, viewers saw band-member Jeffrey Daniel performing a dance routine. But what a routine! Pan’s People it was not. There was the then-fashionable robotic dance moves, and then . . .he was moving backwards while walking forwards!
Moonwalking, for that is what it was, was not new at the time, being, according to Wikipedia, well-known in dance circles. But this was arguably the first time a mass British audience had ever seen it, and this was years before Michael Jackson appropriated the move for himself. It was the number one topic in the playground the day after, and we all tried to imitate the move.
With the growth of alternative mass outlets for moving images of pop performers, such as MTV and more trendy programmes on Channel 4 like The Tube, Top of the Pops declined in relevance, especially as the same faces from the 1960s and 1970s were still presenting the show up until the 1990s, this persistence being lampooned by the Smashey and Nicey skits on Harry Enfield’s television shows:
The growth of streaming video services on the back of broadband meant pop fans could watch their favourite acts in high-quality videos at a time of their choosing, so long as they were at an internet-enabled computer.
The last-ever Top of the Pops went out in 2006, a year after YouTube opened its doors, closing with an appearance by Jimmy Savile, who had been the first face on the programme back in 1964. Tainted from beginning to end. ITV really dodged a bullet there.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.