Why did everyone watch Top of the Pops?

The terminally uncool "pop" programme from the terminally uncool state TV station, BBC1. A recipe for failure, surely. And yet, everyone watched Top of the Pops. Why was that?

Take a trip back in time to the culturally hegemonic imperial phase of the programme; to a time when it was great act of subversion to play air guitar as you mimed to your hit live on air; to a time when Tony Blackburn was being driven round a lagoon by a Womble in a speedboat.

Let's find out why Top of the Pops was so uncool it went all the way back round and became cool again.

Be expertly briefed each week on a wide variety of intriguing musical topics.

Chapters

• 0:20 Introduction
• 2:00 A medium sized dive
• 4:27 The cultural context of the 1970s
• 7:10 The monstrously egotistical DJ phenomenon
• 10:15 Cross generational water cooler conversations
• 12:52 Subverting the state station
• 16:09 Conclusions

Transcript

Top of the Pops: Terminally uncool kingmakers

“It's Thursday night it's 7:00 it's top of the pops.”

Not my words but those of the resident DJ between 1964 and 2006 on BBC1 in the UK as they introduced yet another weekly episode of Top of the Pops.

It was made by the establishment, it was the BBC, so it didn't have much budget, and it had created some self imposed rules amongst which was then the toria's requirement for performers to mine. So why was Top of the Pops so popular? Why did everybody watch it?

Everyone of a certain age has their Damascene scales dropping from eyes TOTP moment. For me growing up it would have been seeing Sparks before This town aint big enough for both of us with seemingly Hitler on keyboards. For others, David Bowie doing Starman and putting his arm around Mick Ronson. Yikes. A few years later - Is it a man? is it a woman? It's Boy George singing, Karma Chameleon.

Let's take a medium sized dive.

A medium sized dive

Top of the Pops was and in some ways still is a British music chart television programme made by the BBC, broadcast weekly between 1st of January 1964 and 30th July 2006.

It was the world's longest running weekly music show. The idea was simple. Each show consisted of performances of some of the week's best-selling records, generally excluding any tracks moving down the chart or outside of the charts. There was a rundown of that week’s singles chart. The number one was always played, generally live in the studio.

One annual ritual after that roast turkey had been eaten was the special edition of Top of the Pops broadcast on Christmas Day, featuring some of the best singles of the year and the Christmas #1. It survives these days as Top of the Pops 2, featuring vintage performances from the progamme’s archives, although even that stopped in 2017. Now it's just repeats of older episodes.

Quite rapidly the show created a momentum of its own. you could choose not to go on it, as for example The Clash did for some sort of ideological reason. But you'd be cutting off your nose to spite your face. With the exception of some fringe programmes such as the Old Grey Whistle Test, it was the main way in which people saw music when they were growing up. It was tremendously influential. It's sometimes said that Marc Bolan of T Rex wearing glitter and satin as he performed Hot Love created the concept of glam rock. 

What was the mysterious power of Top of the Pops? Let's have an entirely reasonable debate.

An entirely reasonable debate

The Monolithic World of the 1970s

Everybody's Top of the Pops imperial phase tends to coincide with the decades between when they were six and 16. You can't really go out in the evening so you're a prisoner in your own living room it's Thursday it's 7:00 it's top of the pops.

So for me that decade will be the 1970s but it so happens that that was also the imperial phase of Top of the Pops. So the first commentary should be on what was it about the 1970s which made the programme so important.

I’d just like to quote from the 8 miles higher website that’s got this lovely paragraph about that decade: The 1970s was less a decade than a bridge between the 60s in the 80s it opens with the overhang of the Harold Wilson Edward Heath mixed economy consensus that had navigated Britain from post war austerity to the swinging London boom. And endures long enough for the patchwork decade to close with the advent of Margaret Thatcher inaugurating a less compassionate more acquisitive future. When the nostalgia-industry seizes upon the seventies it fumbles for trashy Glam and Glitter. A distant planet on which the media was narrower, to the point of monolithic. There were three television channels, ITV, BBC1 and BBC2. There was no network of commercial radio. There was very little by way of regional BBC radio stations. 

The website goes on to make a great point about the economy. For the first time teenagers had some cash to spend and 45rpm singles were affordable – even disposable.

So, for the first time there was a platform for artists and bands to appear in front of the nation on television. But unlike in later decades, there was nowhere else to turn. It was Top of the Pops or bust. It could literally make or break a group.

And then, mixed up in all this was the monstrous spectre of the weirdly egotistical Radio One disc jockeys.

The Star Power of the Radio 1 DJ

Top of the Pops was generally hosted by a Radio One disc jockey. And Radio 1 was the way we all heard pop music. Disc jockeys in some ways became like Hollywood stars for a short while. Bigger than the groups themselves.

One of the consequences of these two monopolies - monoliths if you like, Top of the Pops and Radio 1, was that the deejays who appeared on both became household names. You can make an enormous amount of money being an international DJ these days, but you still won't have the cultural clout of a Tony Blackburn or a Noel Edmonds back then. Ridiculous as it might sound, in the same way that Christopher Nolan can open a movie despite not being in it, many people enjoyed watching Top of the Pops even if they didn't like the music, because of the safe, fun, cheeky unthreatening, welcoming presence of Alan Fluff Freeman or Dave Lee Travis, the soi-disant ‘Hairy Cornflake’.

When the Radio One roadshow came to town, it was a massive event. Rather like the railways arriving in your town in the 19th century you felt you were on the map if the Radio One roadshow came your way. It was an opportunity to see Tony Blackburn in a speed boat on a lagoon being driven by a womble. Life doesn't get any better than that.

In some cases the DJ’s actually became the records they played. The notorious Jimmy Savile started in 1962 with “Ahab The Arab”. Tony Blackburn’ had “So Much Love”, while Laurie Lingo And The Dipsticks actually hit no.7 in April 1976 with an anglicised version of CW McCall’s citizen-band hit “Convoy”. By DJs Dave Lee Travis and Paul Burnett. Mildly amusing at best, its Top Ten status again had more to do with the familiarity of its participants than its quality. 

One of the unforeseen and in retrospect perhaps predictable consequences of men with fragile egos being given too much untrammelled power was that some of them abused that power to greater or lesser extents. It's an age-old story and continues to be played out to this day in Hollywood and beyond. It was in my opinion slightly mixed up with the Anything Goes libertarianism which was a hangover from the 60s as well. 

Cross-generational water cooler conversations

Not only did all your mates if you were young watch the programme, but generally there was only one TV in the house, so the whole family watched the same programmes in the evening. There might be a bit of bartering, but generally speaking it was accepted that once a week the kids were allowed to watch Top of the Pops. And consequently, because people ate dinner earlier in those days, by and large your parents watched the programme with you.

Now your dad with his pipe and cardigan might have rolled his eyes and said what's the world coming to when he saw Steve Priest the bassist from Sweet appearing in his platform shoes and crazy getup. But oddly it was one of the ways in which the generations reached out to each other. As one of Stuart Murdoch's lyrics goes, talking about an old retired major He remembers all the punks on the hippies too and he remembers Roxy Music in 72.

Although music is less generally generationally divided now and a good thing too what we don't have are those moments where we all watch a new band emerging for the first time on live TV. Obviously and that's probably the main reason why we don't have the iconic figures such as Elton John Queen ABBA Rod Stewart and so on and the big hits where everybody could sing along at wedding receptions for years to come. So it's a shame to have lost that one element of cross generational unity. Your mum or dad may not know shake off by Taylor Swift your granny may not know that Beyoncé song. So the other thing that's happened is those 70s hits have become slightly eternal. We didn't anticipate that when we thought the whole thing was rather disposable at the time.

It worked because it was the BBC

I actually believe because it was the BBC because it was traditional and stuffy and because it had self imposed rules, that that provided the framework which artists wanted to subvert in a way the tacular programme on a non licence fee payer channel could not have done.

Because the programme had started out livestarted out live and therefore the BBC in their justifiable paranoia wanted to exercise some degree of control over those crazy pop stars. The convention emerged that performers had to mime their hits. In later years this stipulation was relaxed.

Once again the law of unintended consequences is seen to kick in. Fair enough the BBC doesn't want it 7:00 on Thursday night slot to be taken over by people like the Sex Pistols and their the notorious ways. 

Looked back on from a point of view of at least 20 and in many cases 40 years on, the ways in which performers subverted the miming convention often seems quite petty and childish now and not really subversive at all. Any number of bands swapped instruments. Jools Holland is seen smoking a massive cigar when he should be playing keyboards on Up the junction. There's John Peel the DJ pretending to play the mandolin and there's Rod Stewart kicking a football around with his band when they should be playing. And there's Morrissey with out a microphone waving a bunch of gladioli around instead.

Funnily enough things just became worse when artists were allowed to sing. Kurt Cobain sang Smells like teen spirit in unrecognisable baritone drool. New Order committed one of the many acts of self-sabotage appearing on the show. 

Had it been a cool programme the artist would have revered the platform and played accordingly as they did on say  The Old Grey Whistle Test at the time. But it was these acts of subversion which became the incidents that we talked about. They actually boosted the popularity of the programme - dear old auntie BBC paid for by the licence fee, shaping the music of the 1970s and indeed beyond. 

You might say it's a powerful argument against the free market. But perhaps that's another story.