Some people will, inevitably, be surprised that
Top Of The Pops officially gave up the ghost on Tuesday evening. But with audience figures dipping to an all-time low, it’s amazing that such a quaint programming format limped on to its fifth decade.
What was its raison d’etre, again? “A new series for teenagers . . . based on the latest discs, mainly hits from the current week’s top 20 or 30,” trumpeted the Radio Times on the week it was first shown in January 1964. Give or take a few desperate latter-day tweaks, it was a description that remained accurate throughout its lifespan.
However, at its peak, Top Of The Pops was so much more than that. The infinite choice of music available to people — either via satellite television or downloads — means that it’s all too easy to forget that the show was a pop-cultural gathering post. Parents watched it to see what was consuming their children. Children watched it because pop music rarely made it on to the telly.
More than any programme of its era, its popularity — more than ten million viewers in the 1970s — was more to do with the lack of alternatives than its corny production values. It was quite simply all there was — and to watch it, you’d have to gain access to the only TV in the house. When it was over, you’d have to wait another week for your next fix. Instant gratification had yet to become a phrase, let alone a reality.
Of course, it wasn’t the first programme of its kind — that honour goes to Ready Steady Go! However, by basing itself on the pop chart, it was the first with the full co-operation of the music industry. With a maiden episode that boasted the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Dusty Springfield, the Hollies and Cliff Richard, it wasn’t long before it became a crucible in which generational differences were forged. Nine years later, a memorable Top Of The Pops appearance still had the power to steal a young mind from those entrusted to safeguard it. John Cameron Mitchell, the American film director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, remembers, at the age of 10, seeing David Bowie in 1973 while in a Scottish Benedictine boys boarding school: “Short trousers, no radios or records. One night, in a rare gesture of goodwill, the monks allowed us to watch Top Of The Pops. I see David Bowie and he scares the shit out of me. He’s pale and he’s painted, he’s butch and he’s femme, smiles like a reptile and lives on his back, snuck off to the city, loves to be loved, Jean Genie, let yourself goooo . . . Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I catch Father John watching me and blush.”
In his memoir, Black Vinyl, White Powder, Wham!’s manager, Simon Napier-Bell, recalls seeing Wham! on television for the first time: “Top Of The Pops was a programme on which the director never directed the artist,” he wrote. “He left them to perform as they wished. When Wham! came on to do Young Guns, they completely changed the way the programme looked. It was as if they’d rehearsed with the TV crew for days.” In fact, Wham! was merely a product of the programme on which they were about to appear. Canny beyond their 19 years, the pair had indeed spent all night rehearsing in George Michael’s mum’s front room, aware of just how one good Top Of The Pops performance could make a career.
Anyone seeking to explain the demise should ask themselves whether a seismic pop culture moment could have happened on the show — or, indeed, any of its terrestrial competitors: CD:UK, The Coca-Cola Chart Show — in the last few years. It’s not Top Of The Pops’ fault that schoolchildren didn’t rush to the playground the morning after the Justin Timberlake cameoing-in-a-dolphin-suit-alongside-the-Flaming-Lips moment and debate it feverishly. Most probably didn’t see it. They had other things to do, and, crucially, the means to be doing them in privacy: computers, PSPs, televisions in bedrooms.
More to the point, it’s not as though there’s a shortage of music. In 1976, one of British Telecom’s most popular services was Dial-A-Disc — where you paid to listen to a chart hit being played down the line. Going to a phone box and dialling 161 was effectively like climbing inside a megalithic iPod.
In 2006, if you really want to, you can spend all your time amassing music and not pay a penny — and be able to listen to it on the bus, in Topshop or holding for British Gas. Top Of The Pops became obsolete because the music is no longer the spectacle. The more that vacuous blinking teen-sprite Fearne Cotton tells us a live Red Hot Chili Peppers outside broadcast is — blink — amazing, the less we believe her. However good it is (and it was), it’s not going to get anyone talking.
The big water cooler moments of pop in the last few years have come from talent shows: the bad auditions in Pop Idol; the pantomime rows on The X-Factor. The one thing that unites generations in their music consumption is a newly-discovered fascination with the process: the journey upwards; the whoring and the self-abasement involved in getting there.
Maybe it’s because in this post-karaoke era, people see something of themselves in the queues of people who take days off work in order to risk humiliation at the hands of the man who discovered Gareth Gates, Michelle McManus and Il Divo. Starmaking seems to have usurped star-watching in the public imagination. It could, after all, be you living the fairytale.
It’s an odd kind of democratisation, this power to join in the fun and help determine your own entertainment — but one emblematic of a world in which music is more ubiquitous than our parents could have ever imagined. Just as modern buildings prefer to wear lifts on the outside, pop’s thrill has diffused to encompass its inner workings.
That means the hard work that used to predate that glittering Top Of The Pops debut — the luckless early aspirations, the heady six-month acceleration of a career, the drama of the first reviews, the first intimations of how lives will be changed.
On the face of it, the revolution ushered in by the massive online (predominantly teenage) music communities who gather on myspace, bebo and NME’s new MyNME site couldn’t be more different. Common to both though is this thoroughly modern fascination with the process. While mum and dad sit pressing the red button, children are trawling the internet looking to commune with bands who may have only just formed.
And the music industry is discovering that their tastes are way more adventurous than anyone could have guessed. Before ending their mayfly-like existence, the Anglo-American trio Test Icicles inked themselves a deal and a brace of hits on the basis of their growing online community. Their story wasn’t as dramatic as that of Arctic Monkeys, but it’s worth noting that the band’s abrasive art-punk racket appealed to an audience so young that they were frequently forced to play exclusive under-16s shows.
The pop-cultural gathering posts, then, are not what they once were. Top Of The Pops mattered because it brought the generation gap into the front room. The gap is still there, of course, but it is characterised not by arguments, but by silence. Do we want silence, though? It’s pointless pining for the days when a family lived out their leisure hours before the flicker of the TV. We might find that we would barely last a weekend without tearing each other apart. But the compromise that comes with sharing a life, sharing discourse is a good preparation that comes with starting your own family. We’ll see what the long-term consequences are.
In the meantime, the kids have gone back up to their rooms. If they want chart hits, they will most likely have a TV and a music channel dedicated to whichever tribe they feel they most belong. And if they want to go underground and commune with what may or may not be the next Arctic Monkeys, they’ll turn on their computers. The next pop revolution will not be televised.
How 60 years of technology brought music to our ears
1948 The first commercial Community Antenna Television (CATV) system is developed by John Walson. This evolved into cable TV
1962 Origins of the internet: a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of M.I.T. discussing his “Galactic Network” concept
1964 First Top of the Pops presented by DJ Jimmy Savile. The first artists to appear were the Rolling Stones, who sang I Wanna Be Your Man
1964 The Beatles' first major movie, A Hard Day's Night, is credited with kick-starting music videos
1967 The first national network of satellite television, called Orbita , created in the Soviet Union
1970 The start of Top of the Pops’s heyday. At it's peak it attracts an audience of 15 million
1977 Launch of the Apple II, the first successful home computer
1981 Launch of the IBM PC
1981 MTV launched with the words: “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” spoken on camera by John Lack, one of its creators. Station’s first video is Video Killed The Radio Star
1981 First reception of consumer satellite TV in the United States
1985 VH1 launched
1987 MTV Europe followed by an Asian service in 1991 and MTV Latino in 1993
1990 Digital cable services become widespread and file-sharing begins with popularisation of mp3 music files
1999 Napster is first major P2P (Peer to Peer) file-sharing tool
2000 Popworld website launched by pop mogul Simon Fuller
2001 First Popworld TV show presented by Simon Amstell and 16-year-old Miquita Oliver
2001 Simon Fuller creates the Pop Idol format, later exported worldwide
2001 Apple introduce iPod portable digital audio player
2002 Apple’s iTunes Music Store followed by proliferation of rivals
2002 Creation of Friendster, the networking website favoured by music fans
2003 Launch of MySpace, the social networking website (now owned by News Corporation, which also owns The Times)
2005 YouTube launched, a website which allows users to upload, watch and share video clips
2005 AOL’s webcast of Live8 watched by 170,000
2006 MySpace Music launched, a strand of the site dedicated to music
2006 Apple announce that the iTunes Music Store has sold a billion music downloads
2006 Development of 3G technology means new generation of mobile phones can download music tracks and videos
