Let's be honest, even the Star Bar wasn't the best idea. Not least because it was taking up valuable time in a half hour show where there could have been more music (though admittedly in the Cowey area that would likely just be a performance we'd already seen 3 times before). Might have worked better on CD:UK who had more time to play with. The last few months of Cowey where they cut away from performances to show wacky behind the scenes clips really were grim.
Well, indeed. I've said before that CDUK was a massive influence on Pops at the time. I think one thing that really did it was when CDUK used to do a record review and one week it was Louis Walsh and Mel C, and they had a (very good-humoured) argument and slanging match, and it got in all the papers, and gave CDUK a load of publicity. Some of the other features and interviews did that as well, and you knew that Pops really wanted to replicate that, but as you say, they only had half an hour, so they just didn't have the time. And when it became even more like CDUK in the 2003 revamp, they never had anyone like Cat Deeley who could do it.
The Star Bar might have been a good idea, but it was executed so badly, because for some reason they seemed to forget it was actually supposed to be on television, so the acoustics were awful and everyone had to awkwardly pass microphones around. And there were never any stars in it, of course.
Whilst I completely understand all the criticism of Cowey's production of TOTP, it's hard for me to be objective about it since this was 'my era' of the Pops, even if CD:UK was by far and away miles better. That said, I used to be of the mindset that Andi Peters was the cause of TOTP's demise, but I now think it was the stagnation towards the end of Cowey's reign (even with the revamp and the Star Bar and all that) that probably meant it was too late to save it by the time Peters took over.
Yeah, I still watched it every week, and because I had a video by this point I would always record it (I might have been less bothered about the repeats if I hadn't watched it religiously every week, which most people don't do). I was actually quite excited when Cowey took over because it did seem a bit more imaginative than in previous years, with the audience more involved to make it a bit of a spectacle, and some imaginative presentation. But it was stagnating by the end, Cowey stayed there a bit too long and probably didn't change enough.
It's easy to say the Andi Peters era is the low point of Pops and they did do some very bad things, but one thing that was good was that they tried to make it more of a spectacle and more of a show rather than a bunch of records strung together, and they always tried to have something special every week (although they would sometimes overdo the promotion a bit, I remember one week when they announced Kylie was on the following week,
before
the opening titles of that week's show). Which hadn't been the case for the previous years.