Beeb reruns THIRTY YEARS of Top of the Pops.

NOW then, now then... legendary DJ Sir Jimmy Savile is coming back on the box as the Beeb reruns THIRTY YEARS of Top of the Pops.

The iconic music show returns tomorrow night on BBC4, kicking off with the episode that went out on April 1, 1976.
Top of the Pops, axed in 2006, will then be aired in consecutive order every Thursday - just like they used to be.

And, with plans to run them for as long as fans want to watch, TOTP could be around until 2041.

credit: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/3500960/SIR-Jimmy-Savile-is-back-on-the-box-as-the-Beeb-reruns-30-years-of-Top-of-the-Pops.html

Or quietly dropped within a matter of weeks.

possibly when the beeb has had enough of jimmy saville quotes and 70's fashion lol

April fool?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zwrn9

Nope

Great to see BBC4 do this, after what seems like forever since UK Gold stopped showing them!

Personally though, I'd show random episodes and alternate weekly between the 80s (imperial phase mid 80s!) and 70s.

Let's see what happens when they get to July & the 'odd' missing episode?

Do they jump ahead, going out of sequence?

Miss a week & put something else on?

Perhaps, if we're really lucky, they might throw in a pre 76 episode?

Looks like tonight the 1976 episode is 30 mins, on Sunday it's 35 and in the 7.30 slot next Thursday it's 40. 5 mins here and there is possibly just a scheduling thing but to shave ten mins off some slots suggests there is some editing being done to fit in half-hour slots (and there will be lots of odd lengths in the weeks to come, that's for sure).

The Thursday showing is actually next week's episode, the Radio Times cocked up. I think one of the reasons they picked 1976 is that the majority of that year's episodes are thirty minutes long, to make it a bit easier.

Or maybe earlier years have a lot of wiped episodes?

The BBC only began keeping each weekly episode of TOTP in April 1976; what's left from before then is patchy for each year.

Only certain performances exist for the early years, the earliest complete episode is from Boxing Day 1967, at least four episodes have the presenter links muted, and even a handful of episodes from 1976 and 1977 are still missing in the archives.

btw, the compilation of what's there from pre-April 1976 on BBC Four now is in 4:3 and DOG-less

Also not apparently using the original soundtracks too. Pretty much everything up to Rod Stewart sounds like it's using album track recordings and not what was originally transmitted. The most obvious clue was Cher clapping away mid verse and hearing nothing on the soundtrack. Also a similar occasion with the drums on Whiter Shade of Pale.

Of course a more obvious explanation for that is more likely to be that since the state of TOTP prior to 1976 is very patchy, mostly missing and on occasion only just about broadcast quality, and the original audio would by now be of very poor quality.

Nice to see though the production is 4:3 and not cropped. Need to see more of this programme format if the entire production is made up of archive footage, it wasn't all that long ago when everything was being cropped.