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1990 on BBC Four (January 2018)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
VM
VMPhil
As nice as it would be for them to go all the way up to 2006, I can see interest slowly fading from casual watchers as we enter an era where it stopped becoming as important a programme as it was to the generation/s before. By the time I got into chart music in 1999, I had various music channels and CD:UK at my disposal, followed by the internet and eventually mp3s in a couple of years - I did briefly get into the show during the later Cowie era of 2002/03 when I started downloading songs, but by the time of the All New revamp I joined most of the population in not really bothering with it anymore.

Everyone has their own answer as to when the show stopped being great (usually connecting with them becoming older and not caring about the music anymore) but the 1991 revamp does seem to be agreed to be the start of a long, slow decline for the rest of the show's life, followed by the moving to Fridays in 1996, the previously mentioned 'All New' 2003 revamp, and eventually the "We really, really want to stop making this" move to Sundays in 2005.

I'd like them to at least get to the Britpop era, although that does require sitting through a few years worth of Stan Appel produced episodes.
Blake Connolly and Lottie Long-Legs gave kudos
:-(
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A former member
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LL
Lottie Long-Legs
Oh dear, first time I've ever actually noticed this on the graphics with the studio act rather than within the countdown where in the 1986 shows there was a period of spelling errors galore.

Will Downing losing a letter in his surname on tonight's 28th April 1988 edition.

http://i68.tinypic.com/b8ttue.png


James Brown was “The Playback Mix” too.

14 days later

VM
VMPhil
I've been waiting for last night's episode as it features the second of only two appearances by one of my favourite '80s bands, Prefab Sprout, but also because their performance was uploaded officially to YouTube and featured a stereo soundtrack. The BBC Four broadcast did indeed also have a stereo soundtrack. The last couple of weeks of episodes have been in mono, so I wonder if this was this the first regular episode in stereo (there was the one a while back presented by Janice Long but that seems to have been a one-off). I guess we'll find out in the coming weeks.
JA
james-2001
The 1/10/87 edition was definitely in stereo too, as seen by the BBC archive copy that was floating around. BBC4 didn't show that one though.

We're not that far from the start of the Radio 1 stereo simulcast anyway when they will definitely all be in stereo.
LL
Lottie Long-Legs
The 1/10/87 edition was definitely in stereo too, as seen by the BBC archive copy that was floating around. BBC4 didn't show that one though.

We're not that far from the start of the Radio 1 stereo simulcast anyway when they will definitely all be in stereo.


Was that the case, though? I thought it was a while later that the show was broadcast in stereo through the telly - hence the simulcast idea.
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JA
james-2001
The picture the TOTP Facts twitter account posted of him looks more like Colonel Sanders

*
VM
VMPhil
I've been waiting for last night's episode as it features the second of only two appearances by one of my favourite '80s bands, Prefab Sprout , but also because their performance was uploaded officially to YouTube and featured a stereo soundtrack. The BBC Four broadcast did indeed also have a stereo soundtrack. The last couple of weeks of episodes have been in mono, so I wonder if this was this the first regular episode in stereo (there was the one a while back presented by Janice Long but that seems to have been a one-off). I guess we'll find out in the coming weeks.



Never have I been more astonished, infact taken aback with shock, at how different someone now looks compared to how they used to look, as when I took a look to see what Paddy McAloon looked like nowadays after seeing him on last night's 19th May 1988 TOTP and wondering how he'd fared since then.

My instant reaction was that he immediately reminded me of Father Abraham with the Smurfs, seen here on TOTP 1978. Shocked


He looked pretty similar to how he looked on TOTP until the end of the '90s, from the photos I've seen. Around that time he had detached retinas in both eyes, and then a few years later he had tinnitus, the latter of which explains why there haven't been many Prefab Sprout albums since 2001 (the most recent of which was a one-man band effort as he can no longer work in a recording studio with other musicians - he uses an ancient Atari ST computer to make the basic tracks).

Whilst dealing with the detached retinas, he spent a lot of his time listening to radio phone-ins, the result of which was the beautiful I Trawl the Megahertz album, which was reissued earlier this year.

The picture the TOTP Facts twitter account posted of him looks more like Colonel Sanders

This photo is taken from around the time of the Crimson/Red album release in 2013, I believe. He can dress how he likes as far as I’m concerned, he’s one of our greatest songwriters.
VM
VMPhil
Incidentally, and I promise this is tenuously connected to TOTP, I first heard Prefab Sprout when I was watching a video online of an old ‘A Day in the Life of Radio 1’ documentary (BTW I can't find any trace of this on Genome - was it only released on video?)

Unfortunately the first part which included the song has been taken down, but basically it was Adrian John opening his early breakfast show with ‘The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ - he was actually a presenter on a BBC Four episode of TOTP recently. A few years later I heard the song again and recognised it from the documentary, and got into Prefab Sprout properly soon afterwards.

The rest of the parts are available if you want to see what Radio 1 was like in 1988:

JA
james-2001
Funnily enough "The Sound of Crying", one of their lesser known songs (but did pop up on The Vault's Chart Show repeats back in 2007, doesn't seem to have ever been on TOTP though) was in the background of a scene of an episode of ITV3 Emmerdale last week.

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