BBC4 broadcast oddest ever programme

As a brand, it's pretty much consigned to history now. It still surprises me that the BBC justified their axing of TOTP in 2006 by basically saying it was no longer "relevant" in the current pop climate of music channels and instant downloads- yet they still wheel it out every Christmas.

To whom is the Christmas show meant to appeal anyway? Most kids/teens who download chart music will still preferentially want to watch their favourite artists and groups on Sky's music channels or on Youtube and the like, not sit down for an hour to watch a programme which is shown only once a year on a channel that shows no other chart music-related shows at any other time of the year. Most of them (like my 10 year old daughter) will never even have heard of TOTP.

As for ignoring the 50th anniversary, it would have been a tough job to look back at the show's beginnings and general history whilst completely ignoring Savile or at least mentioning him in name only. And really, the weekly show isn't 50 years old anyway. It was killed off at the age of 42.

Of course it's significant, fully agreed it was terrible, crass TV, but it's not healthy to try and erase from memory, shovelling it under the carpet. As I say, millions watched it every week (unlike much of the crass crap we have today !)

The Guardian article is wrong, three Gary Glitter performances were shown when they were repeating 1977 - one of the episodes was even repeated on BBC2 with Glitter intact. King was edited out in 1976, right in the early days of the repeat run but was left in in 1978. The only other bits that have been edited out is when it's unclearable footage, a la the Grease videos and an Elvis film clip they showed the week he died. I also think the Barron Knights' performance might be edited out next week, judging by the EPG, given it was on C4's Alright In The Seventies the other day and the lyrics are somewhat unfortunate.

The argument about them needing to broadcast the Savile and Travis episodes might have some merit if they were routinely repeating every other programme, and if all repeat runs had to be complete from first episode to last. But they're not. They're selecting episodes to broadcast and if one's unsuitable they just don't show it. They never said they'd show every single one. It's not like this is post-Savile fear either because there are other examples. There's an episode of Mr Benn where he becomes a big game hunter and they stopped repeating it in the eighties because they didn't think it was appropriate anymore. They were still able to show all the others. The same is true here.

They're not destroying the Savile and Travis episodes, they're still plundered for clips of the acts. They're not repeating them but so what? They never repeated them when Savile was still alive and Travis hadn't been arrested. Some shows don't get repeated at all. The surprise is that BBC4 are showing any of them, not that they're not showing some of them.

As for the Peters era, there were some good things about that era as there was every era of Pops. Some of Peters' decisions were bad but there were some interesting ideas and good performances, and in some ways it was far better than the era we're currently seeing at the moment with its bored audience and appalling production values, in some ways worse, as is always going to be the case with any long-running show that goes through several producers. To my mind, the worst era of Pops was the turgid early nineties under Stanley Appel with everyone singing live and hours and hours of Phil Collins and Meatloaf.

I would argue against some of that because you could say the same thing about performances on The X Factor but it's obvious it's still of vital importance to the music industry, with bands queueing up to appear on it and they get loads of column inches - http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/one-direction-fans-ask-of-poppies-what-are-those-little-red-flowers--eJZAjLuuvl

I absolutely agree with you about the X Factor's importance to the music industry and bands wanting to appear on it. The difference is the X Factor gets millions of viewers every week when it's on air for 4 months of the year. But you ask young people whether they'd prefer to watch X Factor or a once-a-year edition of an old weekly BBC chart show that was axed 8 years ago.

Didn't Cowell want to bring TOTP to ITV at some point? I seem to remember some report about it a few years back.

Agree with the points above by the way.

yes for xmas day.

If Cowell wanted to do a weekly pop show with live bands and videos and the chart, he could, as ITV did with CDUK which was a popular and well-known brand in its day. The Pops format itself is hardly something the BBC can copyright and there have been other pop shows in the past, like The Pepsi Chart and The Roxy which were exactly the same. The Beeb do own the brand and, as they point out, it is still a going concern for the Beeb with the magazine and TOTP2 and, indeed, the Christmas show.

Yeah, teenagers don't remember the weekly Top of the Pops but it still works as a regular thing like The Brit Awards and the MTV Awards. If One Direction are on it, their fans will watch it.

Let's hope the repeats carry on, it's only just getting interesting. There's at least another strike episode with Tommy Vance hosting up in 1981, but I already have that on tape.

Yeah, and there's one in Septembr 1980 with Simon Bates you can see bits of on YouTube. But they're less weird than this one because you can see the presenter, albeit in an empty studio.

There's also a few episodes in spring 1984 where the show came from a condensed version of the set, arranged in a smaller studio, due to an industrial dispute, which Mike Read mentions at the start of this episode:



5th April 1984's show was completely scrapped due to a 24 hour blackout of BBC1 caused by action by the Entertainment Trades' Alliance.

I can recall an edition of the Holiday programme from that era, (that back then was a live studio
production, with three or four film report inserts). It was filmed (and I do mean filmed) in a travel agents
shop, with the presenters sat at the desks, and the closing credits were Letraset characters applied
to the shop window !!