Top Of The Pops - Good To Go?
August 1st 2006 01:41
After 41 years, the biggest music television show in Britain is being taken off the air. This is, undoubtedly, because young people just don't like it anymore. A layman might blame this on the digital charts, or the omnipresent journalistic fail-safe of the swing back to live guitar music as opposed to mimed pop. But it's not these things alone.
Simply, TOTP used to be a monumental television event week in, week out. The grandiose novelty of finding out what the number one record was on a Sunday and then seeing it performed live on the following Friday is not a phenomenon that applies to our generation. Thanks to the wide brush-strokes of the Internet and MTV, TOTP has been running on nostalgia alone for the last ten years of its existence. Think of a legendary performance that gained as much notoriety as, say, the Rolling Stones or David Gedge's anti-mime protest from the show in those last ten years… there aren't any. No TOTP performances have really ignited an act since the days of Brit-Pop, despite the recent slew of 'event' performances in the grounds of BBC studios. Just because they managed to get U2 doesn't make it a landmark performance.
The reason, unsurprisingly, is because the immediacy of cultural intake by today's savvy youth is massively heightened by the Internet and by music television channels. Any landmark events usually happen before Top Of The Pops have had a chance to get the band in the studio and press record. A great many links in the show recently followed the rough template of '(insert artist name) are fresh from having just wowed (insert country/city/member of royal family) and we have them here tonight! (Insert optional pun revolving around recent wowing)'. This is because TOTP doesn’t get there first any more, and is therefore less relevant to its audience. Landmark performances used to come from the show because people didn’t have anywhere else to see the artists they love. Now those landmark performances can come from anywhere with a camera pointed at it.
Constant attempts at re-vamping the format of the show often were met with little fanfare. Late-90s producer of the show Chris Cowey's attempt at modernisation (albeit through monster retro-ism) led to revived audiences figures, but ultimately to producing the template for sister-show Top Of The Pops 2. Later attempts to turn it into a magazine show with news features and a look at the album charts didn't hold sway with a better-informed audience, and the same fate was suffered by one last hurrah – a feeble lunge at cross-demographic popularity by combining TOTP and TOTP2 and sticking it in a horrific slot on a Sunday evening. What a bloody mess.
The Retro Years
Is it good, then, that the show has finally bitten the dust? Save for the inevitable sentimental backlash against the BBC's ultimately excellent decision to axe it, it most certainly is a good thing. It was a carcass dragged along the floor by its initial lovers and an irrelevant mound of nostalgia. Nobody gets this emotional about The Word or The Tube, which arguably garnered as many notorious performances as TOTP, so it is down to nothing but wistfulness and a memory of the good old days. And important as that may be, it cannot be denied that the show has lost out terribly to the recent upsurge in technological and cultural exposure. Any longer and the show would be seen as a terminal hanger-on to the coattails of the current 'swing back to guitar-based music' that we hear so much about.
So it is not with a heavy heart that one should say 'farewell' to Top Of The Pops, it is with an appreciation that its time of death was well overdue.
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