The Rolling "Top of the Pops" BBC4 Revival thread.

Couldn't the BBC have picked an episode without Black Lace?

Tonight's first programme, starts with Roy Chubby Brown, ends with Mick Hucknall.

Did no-one tell you we would over-act this way?
Our show's a hit. It's shit. You watch it anyway...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exe7T9TpJZo

The Rembrandt's singer looks like Guy Pearce in Memento. No wonder he wanted to forget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9IDDLXcrMA

BEAT ft General Levy - Incredible - TOTP - 1994

Would love to know how Iron Maiden ended up thrashing through ‘Man on the Edge’ on top of an ancient hill fort in Israel

The pieces are beginning to slowly drift into place as we approach Spiceageddon. The shiny metallic look of the studio bathed in big washes of colour from the lights. Bryan Adams turning up to do odd duets with various people. East 17 looking like they might actually win the war of the boybands against Take That. Somehow even fewer people in the studio audience than before, and they have enough space to all do this non-commital sway-y/shuffle-y dance. Suggs keeps popping up either as the presenter or performing a song.

I'm behind. Hale & Pace's attempt at satire in their presenting capacity was hugely confused, to be charitable.

Camp ageing rockers in Blur and Oasis tees, for some reason? Still less loathable than Keith Allen's joke presenting a few months back.

Fairground's a pretty odd number one really. I kind of like it, Hucknall's obvious off-putting qualities aside. Nice groove in the verses, huge chorus drop.

Were they pre existing H&P characters? That would make more sense.

As much as I despise the human rodent that is mick hucknall, I really love 'fairground'

It's a good song! Actually come across more decent 'Red tracks than expected over the TOTP repeats.

Next episode, Ant & Dec invent electroswing.

Enjoying the well curated TOTP2 snippets at the end

My longstanding in-joke with a friend was that jazz was a genre floundering until PJ & Duncan dropped "Krazy Katz" in the autumn of 1995, at which point sales for jazz records increased 100,000% overnight, much as sales for Western classical music did in the wake of the Toy Dolls' Orcastrated earlier in the year, and luminaries like Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Dexter Gordon were disinterred and paraded in celebration of the new music.

I'd forgotten how many singles PJ & Duncan released. I thought it was basically 'Let's Get Ready to Rhumble' and one other, but no, they were polluting the charts like Robson & Jerome's kid brothers.

Well this Beatles song that's been cobbled together from an old demo sounds grating, I guess they won't be trying that again.

xpost yeah almost all of their hits live in the "forgotten" zone.

There was a budget "best of" in Poundland, one track was clearly too expensive to license but it had all the other 'hits' (except the football one, too new I guess)

They had three studio albums but five compilation albums. Is there any other artist or group who have had far more compilation albums than original studio albums, apart from people who have been dead for decades?

Ant & Dec are credited as songwriters or co-writers on nearly all of their original songs. Which is both simultaneously impressive for what was essentially a comedy inflected boyband, but also pretty tragic when you listen to the actual songs.

It would be impossible for something like their music career to happen nowadays. I think the nearest, in broad terms anyway, is LadBaby, but he's only released singles.

one track was clearly too expensive to license

That would be the cover of 'Stepping Stone' I'm guessing.

No. The one that everybody knows..

A&D's strong but now invisible hits career is a subject I love to bring up (and have already during the TOTP runs). The pair of them are obviously more than eager to pretend there was nothing more than LGRTR.

My fav Ant & Dec single is Shout - classic boyband maturity move that. Look forward to when we get to it.

I have that budget comp (Takeaway). The best one (if more A&D = best) was the 'essential collection' double set that came later that I definitely remember Tesco stocking. Still no We're on the Ball though.

lol Takeaway isn't even in the list of five compilation albums on Wikipedia. And it doesn't have Rhumble - https://www.discogs.com/release/7661579-Ant-Dec-AKA-PJ-Duncan-Takeaway-The-Best-Of-Ant-Dec

Yep, that's the one

Gary Barlow looks so cross all the time he's singing.

Barlow (thinks): I can't chuffing BELIEVE that I'm having to sit at THIS PIANO singing THIS RUDDY SONG *fumes*

Compare to how Mark Owen always looks like he's having a great time.

Oh here's Damon - at least the crowd here are singing along.

Weller looking a lot like mr Spock there

odd set tonight. and the way the style council were set up seemed odd too, all on top of each other.

i don't remember this episode at all

um, was i watching a previous recording rather than one from tonight? they aren't following the published schedule because of the snooker and the epg won't let me go backwards and see.

Last night the schedule was snooker from 7pm until 10pm, then an episode from 1984 followed by one from 1980.

yeah, the one i watched was this from 83 which is in the recent list on iPlayer but must've been recorded before last night (the pvr bundles things of the same name together so it got bumped to top of the new recordings list along with the new one, which turned out to be 30 mins of snooker)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08fsfy0/top-of-the-pops-31031983?seriesId=unsliced

I daresay iPlayer will be fine, but if you were wanting to see "NY at the BBC" and didn't set yr TiVo to record Christine and the Queens, then... yr out of luck.

It wouldn't be TOTP if you didn't occasionally miss it because of the snooker.