I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more.
I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. Blame middle age, or lack of time, or the grim, brutal feeling that you’ve seen it all before and can’t be bothered to see it again, or in my particular case the eight years I spent working as a TV critic for newspapers. (In the eyes of one or two people I worked for, no longer enjoying telly would make me better qualified than ever to write about it.) But what with one thing and another, until Christmas Day I hadn’t sat down and watched anything on television (other than cricket) for about five months.
And what did I see on that day, within the slightly drunken bosom of my extended family? The Christmas Top of the Pops, of course.
For if we non-viewers have anything in common, it’s the unshakeable belief that telly has got so much worse over the years, and that all the great shows cruelly cancelled by idiot executives a few years ago should be brought back exactly the same as they were before. Not that we’d watch them ourselves, obviously. But the nation’s cultural life would surely be richer for their existence. As it happens, it’s only three years since Top of the Pops vanished, after a long and agonising decline into irrelevance. Countless producers had come along, fiddled with the format, and made the show worse. The producers of this Christmas edition were cleverer. Here were the biggest hits of the year, presented straightforwardly — no videos — but with a goodly helping of low-budget cheese. Fake snow, Santa hats, dubbed-on cheers, all in that ridiculous tiny studio watched by 11 goggle-eyed teenagers. The only innovation was technological: if you pressed the red button, the lyrics came up at the bottom of the screen, so you could sing along drunkenly with the songs, whether you knew them or not. In some cases, not knowing them turned out to be an inestimable advantage.
But wasn’t that always the case with Top of the Pops? Great songs alternated with terrible, gut-wrenching stinkers that just happened to have sold well that week. The strength of the original format was that it reflected no individual’s taste, but the wildly unpredictable nature of the singles market. This changed in the 1990s when singles sales plummeted and record companies found it much easier to manipulate the charts. The more control the record companies exercised, the less integrity the chart was seen to have, and people lost interest. The changes wrought on Top of the Pops may have been daft, but they were understandable in the circumstances. When the show was finally cancelled, it genuinely seemed that there was no need for it any more.
And what has happened since? Turmoil. The CD market has collapsed and you only have to see Guy Hands’s fat face in the papers to know that he hasn’t a clue what to do about it (except possibly eat another bun). In the meantime downloads have taken over the top 40 and made it interesting again. Rage Against the Machine reached number 1 over Christmas not because anyone liked the song, but because so many people wanted to stick one up Simon Cowell. This was a purely democratic act: the fact that it was possible shows that the chart lives again. For nostalgists it also provided a classic Top of the Pops moment, as the song is so full of swearwords that they couldn’t play it. O my Smashy and my Nicey long ago! Time, therefore, to bring Top of the Pops back, in its original format, every Thursday, as nature intended it, at 7.30 p.m. I’d watch it. Possibly. You might, mightn’t you? Well, someone would, with a bit of luck.