Show's over for Top of the Pops
Over ten years ago, the (then) controller of BBC1 Alan Yentob was in a meeting with various other BBC employees, and during that meeting they collectively decided the Top of the Pops had no long term future and should be eventually axed. It was a long time coming but a long-neglected show has been finally put out of its misery, well after most have stopped watching it.
There have been many factors involved in the decline and failure of Top of the Pops, but perhaps the most significant of them all is something that tends to be easily overlooked: the scheduling. Ever since that fateful meeting, TOTP has been given a variety of 'death slots' in the schedules, eg. on a Friday opposite a ratings banker such as Coronation Street.
Why was a Friday not a good idea for Top of the Pops? Anything shown on a Friday evening tends to be easily forgotten about, since office gossip about last night's TV - the "watercooler effect" - has proven to be essential for the long term success of formats such as Big Brother, and this is particularly crucial for music/celebrity based formats.
But then came the dreaded final major "do or die" revamp.
Andi Peters was presumably chosen because of his previous experience, but the "All New Top of the Pops" failed on several levels, including the choice of a relatively inexperienced presenter and the inclusion of superfluous "special features" which suffered from a lack of depth as well as only appealing to a minority of the audience who were watching at the time.
Problem was that the majority of the programme's target audience was still tuning in to watch and listen to pop music as opposed to enduring insubstantial 'interviews' with pop stars, so this meant that few viewers were satisfied by what they saw. Top of the Pops was caught between a rock and a hard place, and the blow to the show's credibility was terminal.
And of course the move to BBC Two was the final nail in the coffin, since the show was hastily welded together with the pitiful remnants of the (fairly popular) spinoff TOTP2 to produce a horrible hybrid that appealed to not that many people for precious little of the time, hence the audience plummeting to around 1 million viewers (pathetic for a major channel).
Despite the competiton from dedicated music channels, the demise of TOTP comes at a point when many of these music channels have turned their back on showing music videos during peak time, and the biggest irony is that the most quoted music channel when referring to the reason why TOTP has declined - MTV - is also the worst offender in this regard.
There is still room for music television on the main terrestrial channels, but it would take a channel controller with vision combined with a highly skilled producer to make it successful in a similar vein to the Doctor Who revival. In the meantime, Top of the Pops can be given a well deserved rest, but the idea is still basically a sound one.
