Top of the Pops

Hitman was a quiz show made in Nick's 'wilderness' years between 'Good Morning With Anne & Nick' & joining 'Midlands Today'! Apart from a 'Weakest Link Special' & a 'Inside Out Floods Special' networked from BBC Brum, I can't think of any other Nick Owen network appearances in the last few years? (Do you count anything broadcast on the BBC News Channel as being networked, then you can count a 'down the line' from Brum when talking in his Luton FC chairman role, when their 'supporters' decided to disgrace themselves last year!)

Agree on Bobby Davro & CATS Eyes by the way. Mickey Mouse wants shooting!

Nice to see TOTP2 back. Not too happy they zoomed in on Tears of Fears's Everybody Wants To Rule The World at the start just to 'avoid' the No 16 chart graphic. Surely they could have used an different performance, shown the video, or keep the graphic in altogether.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01j9sxb/TOTP2_25_05_2012/

Thought something like that had happened, explains why it looks badly framed then:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01j9sxb/?t=37m22s

Did you see last Monday's first show, where the first 15 mins or so were zoomed / squashed, as they didn't set the aspect ratio correctly?

Or covered it up with a modern graphic naming the artist and song.

TOTP2 have done that for years, always looks ghastly

Weirdly on the Eurovision special on Saturday they left in the song graphic for Katrina and the Waves, which doesn't normally happen on TOTP2. Presume it must have been because it was after the first few lines of the song which was unusual and perhaps difficult to zoom it out, or maybe just because the graphic pointed out they were Eurovision winners? Either way unusual. A particularly odd one is whenever "Don't You Want Me" by the Human League is shown they edit a bit from later on in the performance in at the start, because on original broadcast it has a slow pull out from Kid Jensen during the intro and the TOTP2 style is not to show the presenters (although funnily enough once again the Eurovision show went against that and had a brief clip of Steve Wright introducing Johnny Logan!)

(should point out it's the Christmas performance of Don't You Want Me I was referring to, not the one they showed last night!)

A handful of the TOTP2 shows from the end of the Wrighty era experimented with leaving in presenter links and original captions.

Re: Katrina and the Waves; that performance came from TOTP on 9.5.1997, the week after "Love Shine a Light" won. The song was at 50 in the chart; hence no chart position, and it was the first song on that week's TOTP, kicking straight in after the opening titles. As there may not have been a point during the performance they could have copied and pasted over the original caption, or the scanning looked particularly bad, it's probably a case of the producers deciding to "leave it in"

Another example of a studio performance I've remembered where there's dodgy editing to cover the original caption is "99 Red Balloons" by Nena:

Original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUfmoTGgsN8

From a more recent TOTP2 repeat (scanning the caption out): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlrEk68In80 - I've also seen them taking a chunk from the middle instrumental break and pasting it over where the intro caption was.

It was also from a period when they were messing about with the captions so it appears at the top of the screen, which probably doesn't help. Just looks a bit weird on TOTP2 when it's literally seconds after the 2007-era caption appears.

That is bad - actually zooming in on the picture in-vision looks really unnatural!

That episode was a late edit which featured some added Bee Gees as a tribute to Robin Gibb. It was played out from post production in TV Centre (rather than off server as usual), which I guess explains how it could have had the wrong aspect ratio set to begin with - though not why it took so long for anyone in playout to notice!