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

"Screaming Blue Messiahs I Wanna Be A Flintstone" excuse me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGZenzfg3A0
Yeah me neither. This looks like the kind of thing that Beavis & Butthead would have taken the piss out of for 30 seconds.

Is Gary Davis cosplaying as Columbo?

The exuberance of Billy Ocean's performance really makes 'Get Outta My Dreams' work where in someone else's hands these lyrics could be a bit of a crepe-fest.

Talking of crepe-fest lyrics, here's Was (Not Was) with 'Spy In The House Of Love'.

In French class at school we had to translate the lyrics to Vanessa Paradis' 'Joe le Taxi' and boy is it bobbins.

Line two isn't actually "Mars bar and Soda", is it?

It's "Y marche pas au soda" which Google translates as "Do not walk in soda" which doesn't make any sense, although at the time our class thought it was "mange un soda" / "eats a soda" which started an argument about eating a soda being weird.

I think my version makes more sense: taxi driver grabs a quick snack..

“He doesn’t run on soda.” Just like his car, he needs something stronger (like that rum).

Oh that makes sense.

Meanwhile here's racist piece of shit Morrissey.

Rick Astley is such a bad dancer, it's no surprise they nearly always showed him from the waist up.
Sisters of Mercy's 'Dominion'! They appeared on TOTP in late March 1988.

God. I remember loving that when it came on TOTP. I was 10. Never really embraced Goth after that.

Apart from the Temple Of Love remix. Which rules.

No, it shines like thunder

xp Andrew Eldritch would claim that he never really embraced Goth either...

I wonder if the Sisters and Erasure met in the BBC canteen?

It's easy to feel sorry for the bass player from Bros, but boy (pun not intended) does he look like a complete tool here.

Heart cosplaying as Jem & The Holograms here. Also the de riguer hair-metal-drummer-spins-a-drumstick-at-the-camera-shot.

I liked Patsy Kensit's version of 'I'm Not Scared' at the time, but the PSB version is much much better.

This re-run of a 2001 edition of TOTP2 somehow manages to be more dated in it's presentation that the 1988 TOTP episode that preceded it.

Still playing catch-up here and had a summer of 87 binge tonight. The one from 23 July was an eye-opener: first Boy George appeared to be rapping in an American accent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmmYMFvhFQI but then came possibly the most surreal performance I've seen in all of these reruns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJMw_kry75w I can only assume I must have fallen asleep for a week in 1987 because I have no memory of either of these.

(Argh, sorry about the formatting)

I remember that chorus but had completely forgotten that Shaky went through a Hi-NRG phase, I hope he recovered.

Originally recorded by Gary Glitter, which explains the lyrical dodginess...

Scott Fitzgerald with the UK's 1988 Eurovision entry - yeah I don't remember either.

ver Boys score another #1, this time with a song they were going to send to Madonna but didn't because they were worried that she might reject it.

(xp) It did very well!

In 1988, he was the first ever artist chosen by telephone vote to sing the UK's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Go". The song was written and composed by Julie Forsyth, daughter of the entertainer Sir Bruce Forsyth.[4] Forsyth joined Fitzgerald on stage at the contest in Dublin, alongside her husband Dominic Grant (also of Guys 'n' Dolls) and Des Dyer (formerly of Jigsaw), to perform backing vocals. Ronnie Hazlehurst conducted the live orchestration. Fitzgerald came second in the contest, by one point, to Switzerland's winning entry performed by Celine Dion. "Go" reached number 52 in the UK Singles Chart in April 1988.

While Climie Fisher were just on I started thinking that we'd reached the point in the 80s where you could probably still dress like that walking down the street and people wouldn't think you were a prize wombat, but then Steve Wright and Bruno Tory Brookes appeared and my theory went down in flames.

Bruno Brookes, the personification of half-arsed. Half-arsed suit, half-arsed mullet, half-arsed off-hand attitude to presenting and probably music generally.

Steve Wright: "Let's cosplay as yuppie wankers!"
Bruno Brookes: "Who said I was cosplaying?"

'Girlfriend' by Pebbles is surprisingly not a Prince song, but boy does it wish it was.

"OK George, so we know you hate making videos so how about we film the entire thing in more or less one take?"

Woo! Woo! Let's all beat Pat & Mick with sticks.

"OK so instead of just using one James Brown sample in this track, how about ALL the James Brown samples? Even the most obvious ones."

Now I clearly remember watching Fairground Attraction's 'Perfect' on this episode of TOTP back in 1988. My father walked in the room and declared dismissively that they were a "one hit wonder". Not that the old fart ever knew anything about music.

the payback mix, trying to claw some money back from all the unauthorized samples. i guess he didn't do too badly out of the whole thing.

people who liked totp 1988 might enjoy jeremy deller's thing on bbc4 last week:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000777d/everybody-in-the-place-an-incomplete-history-of-britain-19841992 specifically the compare and contrast Hitman and Her segments.

I love watching old Hitman & Her clips on YouTube but i thought huge parts of that documentary were really bad and the praise it has been getting has been very confusing to me

I watched about 20 mins of it.

By all means tell me the great bits were later.

Hang on it was this performance of 'Perfect' where my father made the above "one hit wonder" utterance. Also scope Mike Read dressed as the world's worst Lou Reed tribute act.

loads a money, start turn on 45 pints, anfield rap. is this a nadir?

(enough references in those first two to make them an interesting listen, once. for instance, this latter is referencing Ofra Haza twice removed)

oddly, the eric b track that's also in the charts sounds just as hackneyed.

(who is the goalkeeper on anfield rap?)

and now, wet wet wet, which i seem to remember went on to be number 1 for the next 6 months.

Bruce Grobelaar, I imagine. I'm not about to watch the video to find out.

It is.

It's an indicator of how bad music could sometimes be in the 80s that 'Anfield Rap' isn't even the worst football related single of the decade.

(thanks. i figured it was him - we share a birthday - but i remember him being more imposing, somehow)

going through other episodes to clear up video recorder space. and they say the 70s was the decade that taste forgot...

Exactly what I was thinking.

about 6 episodes in and there's been nothing that i've wanted to keep so far.

erasure's 'victim of love' holds up surprisingly well, probably vince's synth parts, but he's on totp 'playing' guitar.

there are some glimmers of hope in the chart rundown - smiths, mary chain, cult, sisters, spear of destiny. but, playing live, here's pepsi and shirlie again...

Oh, I used to do a weekly commentary on another notable Internet site, but there's been so little to get mildly intersted/ing about for so long.

And I used to save stuff on dvd, but then I got a tivo, got so behind around 1979, then the box died and I lost about five years of saved totp shows. Never mind.