But, of course, they were only falling because older viewers were growing tired of Ric Blaxill's frequent bookings of celeb hosts and obscure bands like Bis, and so were switching over to Emmerdale.
And the fact that it was moved from opposite a big ITV soap to opposite an arguably even bigger ITV soap (at the time, anyway), and at a time of the week when most of the target audience would be going out, makes one wonder just how much faith there was in Pops at the time.
Worth pointing out that when Pops first moved to Fridays in June 1996, it actually wasn't opposite a soap because its first slot was 7pm when it was only opposite ITV quizzes, so it may well have been a genuine attempt to try it out in a different slot to see if it worked. Presumably when it didn't do the business in that slot they decided to move it again to the Corrie death slot at 7.30 (initially 7.25, in fact, after the Muppets) in September. And they'd actually moved it to Fridays for a few weeks in the seventies - I know they did in September 1974 - but soon moved it back then.
I always remember from the chart in Broadcast that whenever Pops wasn't opposite Corrie because of either it being moved for sport, or Corrie being moved for sport, its rating would always shoot up, which suggested it could still have done alright in a different slot. But in the end, for all the revamps they did, the only revamp that would ever have had any effect would have been a crap revamp of Corrie, because people just never bothered checking it out.
To be honest Pops was on its last legs before Ric Blaxill took over, at the end of 1993 it was all over the papers that it was being axed and people even wrote to the Radio Times to express their condolences. I think Blaxill said he was given a year to turn it around or it'd be axed. Certainly it was in a terrible state at that point. Blaxill didn't increase the audience but he did improve its credibility, under Stan Appel in the early nineties it was a laughing stock among kids. It's very similar to Matthew Bannister on Radio 1 at the time - it lost the older audience but gained a more enthusiastic, but smaller, younger audience. Emmerdale was also enjoying a resurgence at the time, it didn't get much press or audience attention in the eighties and skewed massively old, in the nineties it was stating to become the major show it is now.
In fact you could argue that Pops was pretty much destined from the axe since 1991, so it's remarkable that it managed to carry on for another fifteen years. Everyone slags off Andi Peters for destroying it but it was a basket case before then and although clearly there were some very bad bits under his reign, it least it seemed a bit of a spectacle and it knew it was an entertainment show. The worst eras of Pops as far as I'm concerned are the early nineties no miming era under Stan Appel when it skewed really old and was full of people who Really Could Sing and was utterly tedious, and the latter part of the Chris Cowey era. I was actually quite excited in the early days of Cowey's reign because there was lots of quite imaginative presentation and it felt a bit like the Michael Hurll era we're seeing now, but after about a year there were no new ideas at all and it became such a dull never-changing affair, just stringing together pre-recorded performances.
Not always - the format varied over the years, but prior to the 2006-07 series, if a new song was featured then it would usually be a video, though occasionally an artist who had played on TOTP might record an extra performance for TOTP2. In 2006-07 there was always at least one (sometimes two or three) new performances recorded specifically for TOTP2, on the set with the retro logos that's also used for the TOTP Christmas specials.
And initially, TOTP2 wasn't even devised an archive show and was initially 50/50 old and new music - Ric Blaxill devised it as a music magazine for the audience who had grown out of Pops, so it included lots of new music as well. Initially the archive stuff was confined to two sections - The First Time, which would feature a debut performance from a major act, and Recorded For Recall which would include a couple of clips from a specific archive episode (originally two years with brief clips, then just one year with full-length clips). The rest of it would be new records, with clips from the previous week's Pops - the performances of interest to the older audience - and videos from the following week's chart, plus something called The Video Stir which would be an "interesting" video, I remember the first one was a Rolling Stones video that hadn't been finished before it fell out of the charts, and they also showed a couple of times a video by a German band called H-Bloxx where they appeared as ants which was quite a novelty, and other things from the US and European charts.
It stayed like that for a few years, occasionally there would be all-archive episodes but usually it would have new records in as well. When Steve Wright took over in 1997 there was increasingly more archive stuff, and by mid-1998, it was pretty much all archive apart from the one new video at the end, which would usually be a country record as it was producer Mark Hagen's specialist area. The programme became more popular - in 1999 it moved to Wednesdays, and that November there was a week when TOTP and TOTP2 were both on BBC2 and TOTP2 got the higher audience - and so this spot became increasingly important to the industry. The Mavericks were probably the first act to benefit and, as mentioned, as it increased in importance it moved from being all videos to specially recorded material. Often this would be an artist in the chart doing an old song while they were in the studio doing their current single, but sometimes it would be a new single that would get its only play on TOTP2 if it was an AOR kind of thing. And sometimes there were entire programmes devoted to new performances, of course.
As you say, when it came back in 2006, it replaced TOTP and featured new performances, the difference this time being they were from any genre rather than anything specifically aimed at the older audience. They even counted down the top ten for a few weeks.
