When the Zutons performed their latest single on GMTV last month, their fans were moved to mob message boards with tales of how terrible they were. In three toe-curling minutes of purposely poor miming, the Liverpudlian band debunked the myth that life as chart-topping pop stars is one long party.

If you’ve never seen a band looking bored, you probably work for a living. In which case, you didn’t catch Maroon 5 on the ITV lunchtime chat show Loose Women the week before last, performing with the verve of pensioners en route to the post office. Or a jet-lagged Alanis Morissette wearily discussing hang-gliding holidays before slumping on a stool to sing.

There was a time when inviting musicians onto live television was a risky business. The Sex Pistols set the precedent in 1976 with their expletive-strewn rant on Bill Grundy’s talk show. In the 1990s, Happy Mondays’ singer, Shaun Ryder, forced TFI Friday to be pre-recorded after repeatedly ignoring pleas to steer clear of swearwords. In its heyday, even the relatively tame Top of the Pops saw its fair share of drum-kit trashing, riotous outfits and daring dance routines.

When Top of the Pops limped lamely off screen two years ago, a few months after the Saturday-morning children’s show CD:UK had been cancelled, music on terrestrial television was all but declared dead. For the earnest adult rock consumer, there was Later, but mainstream music-dedicated shows were gone from prime time. These days, artists with an album to promote are often faced with a chilling choice — an early-morning appearance on GMTV, with that dreaded stopover on the sofa, or a performance on Paul O’Grady’s afternoon show, before a feature on dancing dogs.

“Persuading an artist to appear on these programmes can be a battle,” admits Steve Morton, who spent seven years as media director at Virgin Records before leaving to manage bands including the Hoosiers and the Automatic. “Every act wants to be on Later, alongside credible musicians, with an audience of genuine music fans. The problem starts when you sell more than 100,000 albums in Britain. To get bigger, you have to reach out to people who aren’t regular music-buyers — say, housewives who occasionally put an album in their trolley at Tesco. When the Hoosiers’ album went platinum, the only way we could reach a new audience was on shows like This Morning and Paul O’Grady. Luckily, the guys have a quirky sense of humour that works well on TV. That’s unusual. With most artists, you take one look at their face and know they desperately don’t want to be there.”

Another manager recalls hours spent last autumn trying to persuade his award-winning American rock band to do the UK chat-show circuit. “They were worried it would affect their credibility,” he says. “They were right, of course, but their album sales had hit a plateau. They were offered Loose Women or Alan Titchmarsh — try explaining to American rockers why they should play on a programme hosted by a genteel middle-aged gardener. They almost agreed to Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Then they discovered the band on the previous week had to dress up as elves. In the end, they did nothing and the album stopped selling.”

With the exception of Jonathan Ross, who occasionally offers the performance slot on his Friday-night series to breaking artists, chat and breakfast shows tend to stick to household names. The Australian teenager Gabriella Cilmi got on GMTV only after her debut single, Sweet About Me, had been used in a deodorant ad.

“Gabriella’s GMTV performance had a huge impact on sales,” says Andrea Edmondson, a TV promotions manager at Island Records. “The ad had been running on GMTV, so the audience knew the song, although probably not who sang it or what it was called. Live performance is crucial to making that link, and it’s why TV is so important. You can hear a track a dozen times on the radio and have no idea about the artist. A performance connects the two and seals the song in people’s minds.”

The show was less memorable for Cilmi, who avoided the sofa, but gave a short interview before her performance. “I honestly can’t remember what the presenter said,” she laughs. “Something about tennis. I know nothing about tennis, so I just nodded.”

At least Cilmi was allowed to sing live. “So far, they have all been live, thank God,” the 16- year-old says. “It’s nerve-racking enough without having to mime. I don’t mind singing in the morning; the hard part is having no audience. What’s funny is when you finish and hear this solitary clapping from the sofa. For a split second, you think, ‘Only one person clapping? How bad was I?’ ”

What everyone in the industry agrees is that no single television programme today has the power to break a new act. “When CD:UK and Top of the Pops were both on, it was a golden age for breaking bands,” Morton claims. “Nothing now reaches those young music-buyers in such big numbers. It was one reason pop became so prevalent. Bands like Blue, Atomic Kitten and S Club 7 all sprang from Saturday-morning TV.”

For Edmondson, mainstream television’s reliance on established stars can be seen in the number of veteran acts in the album charts. “There are hardly any opportunities for new, young acts on top-rating TV shows,” she says. “They know most kids have migrated to the internet and aim their performances at adult album-buyers. Their dream bookings are artists like Neil Diamond and Rod Stewart.”

Yet Edmondson admits there is more music on television than ever before. “Late-night Channel 4 is very committed to music, and ITV2 broadcasts iTunes gigs and summer festivals. For younger viewers, there is BBC Sound, the Green Room and T4. Their audiences are minuscule compared to the millions who watch GMTV, but they are exclusively music fans, so it’s a good place to start.”

The biggest change for the traditional TV plugger, however, is how they sell their artists to broadcasters. A fortnight ago, Island changed the name of its TV

promotions team to “visual output department”, and about half their work now is creating programmes. “In the past,” Edmondson says, “we would spend a huge amount of money on a standalone video for a first single. Today, we spread that money over filmed live performances, content for web pages and viral videos for YouTube.”

The content is produced in-house by Island’s own production company, or in partnership with anyone from Yahoo! to Channel 4. “It allows us to be more creative, and the artists like it because they have total control of how they are represented,” Edmondson says. “For example, we made the recent Girls Aloud documentaries for ITV2 and a half-hour special with Paul Weller for Channel 4. Weller and the Fratellis are two of our acts who only want to appear on TV performing. You wouldn’t see either on a breakfast-show sofa.”

Artists in charge of their own television shows? In the punk days, it would have been anarchy. In the sedate world of 21st-century pop on TV, perhaps it just means the bands won’t look bored.

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