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

Surely this is the event that will get us to finally abolish the monarchy, let's go lads

...and that event would be Vanilla Ice performing live on TOTP?

he put on a good enough show I guess? though I was easily pleased after hearing Pray AND Saviour's Day AND This One's For The Children by NKOTB.

Yeah Robert Van Winkle was easily one of the finer performers in this episode.

I thought The Dream Warriors on the other show also showed good chops.

Some really good performances these last two episodes but some terrible dross as well (Cliff particularly). There's no doubt that both Dream Warriors and Vanilla Ice were able to get a genuinely enthusiastic response out of the audience. But Vanilla looks like a dork trying too hard sometimes, especially when he dances (and particularly in the video where he's dressed like a waiter at a wedding reception). Jim Carrey's parody had already ben broadcast in the US on In Living Color back in October, but no social media back then so not many people in the UK would have seen it. On the other hand IIRC we'd already switched over to thinking of the Iceman as being a tool.

The 90's were full of this apolitical "let's make the world a better place" messaging, as seen on the entries by KNOTB and most egregiously Twenty 4 Seven (racism bad! being nice to animals good!); old school christian pablum by Sir Cliff fits right in. I think I used to assume I just remembered it that way because I was a child at the time but it does seem to have been everywhere.

and then you have vanilla ice singing about his tech 9

Vanilla boasting about being involved in a drive by shooting but the cops let him go because he's white?

So very white white, baby...

seen on the entries by KNOTB and most egregiously Twenty 4 Seven

Also The Farm, which is actually a pretty crappy song despite its iconic chorus.

I give that one a pass for being about a specific event and thus marginally less vapid, even if what the lyrics take away from that event is pretty naive and, yeah, not a great song in general.

and then you have vanilla ice singing about his tech 9

I always assumed this was just a regular pistol.

bloody snooker

this is worse than 9th april

Jesus christ.

Mmm, snooker is better than Phil docs, but.

but both are a load of old balls?

snooker next Friday too

snooker loopy nuts are we
us and them and him and me
we'll show you
what we can do
we can mess up the schedule
worse than Prince Phillip too

pot the reds and
screw that
because Vanilla Ice is never
coming back
snooker loopy nuts are we
we're all snooker
loopy

they're just trolling us now

Re-runs resume. Bizarre to see Shaky perform a Christmas song in May but we've landed in mid December 1990.

the trolling continues

Of the video for 'Freedom', George Michael said something to the effect that "people will enjoy watching it more that I'm not in it".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w8XVtETu98
from 14m25s onwards

return to form there for jive bunny.

not much mixing in that grease megamix.

Worst two show run of the year?

Yes. There have been worse individual shows but these last two are the worst back-to-back shows in a while.

I guess Christmas is often the time of the year the charts are at their most tedious, but fingers crossed January might bring something better.

there are already green shoots of recovery in the breakers section, first show was bizarre in that there were four climbers in the top 10 and they played none of them!

Christmas Day 1990 TOTP on now.

Andi Peters in 'about to hit the gym' action.

That could have been edited down to half an hour and there'd still have been filler.

I really am not sure why they didn't edit out the old Xmas number one clips.

Coming very soon then; Shoe-gazing hits!

High point was the live version of Killer, it wasn’t the worst Christmas show at all though, even if all the old clips were a bit dull - maybe in 1990 you weren’t bombarded with them quite as much as now when November 1st appears to be the start of Christmas.

Some Killer mostly filler.
Radio 1 did play Slade's Zmas joint back in the early 90s but it definitely wasn't like today's streaming dominated chart where for Nov/Dec it's seemingly every Christmas song ever recorded including at least three versions of 'Let It Snow' and Tones & I's 'Dance Monkey'.

I wasn't into the reworked Killer, it changed a lot of what was so great about it and added nothing much in the way of good new bits.

For sure, the single version is at least a 9 out of 10 for me. The vowel-y synth line wasn‘t great and ran for far too long, but taken in the context of a live perfomance I think overall this rawer take worked well with the switch-up to the syncopated rhythm added more energy at a good time and the bleepy stabs in the middle 8 were a nice variation. 7.5/10

ah, that time of the year when there's a metal #1...

(happened quite a bit - sales are generally down after Christmas but the avid metal fans would make an effort to buy there new iron maiden)

also, Grebo week. poppies vocals were terrible.

Sounded like PWEI's backing track was turned way down.

Have I missed the 'highlights of 1991' show or did they just launch into the new year without showing one?

there isn't one.

Well, this is a bummer! 😔 .@russty_russ and anyone else who is following this programme. pic.twitter.com/CcbzqZRVU1

— 80s Retro (@1980s_Retro) May 21, 2021

This is an outrage

I think it will get made eventually, just not at this present time

I'd rather they crack on with the episodes than hang around for months waiting for it to get made like they seemed to with 90.

Someone tell The Stranglers it's not the 80s.

story of '84 on over the weekend and what i think was Mike Reid trying to rewrite history when talking about Relax. he said he was doing a chart rundown show and they were overrunning so he was looking for something to cut...

best of the tube on London Live covering a lot of the same ground recently - siouxsie, frankie, lauper, madonna...