Posted July 27, 200618 yr Final TOTP show is filmed Source: Music Week A host of old and new Top Of The Pops presenters made their way to Television Centre last night to record links for what will be the final show in the programme’s 42-year history, to be broadcast this Sunday. The line-up included Jimmy Savile, Janice Long, Dave Lee Travis and Tony Blackburn as well as more recent personalities like Reggie Yates and Edith Bowman. They recorded links for 10 classic Top Of The Pops performances, starting with The Rolling Stones’ The Last Time. The hour-long show will be broadcast at 7pm this Sunday, and will also include clips of The Spice Girls, Robbie Williams, Madonna, Wham and Beyoncé. There will also be a live performance from this week’s number one, which is looking likely to be either Shakira or Christina Aguilera. Although it is the final Top Of The Pops in its current form, the BBC is considering keeping the programme going as a weekly international show, broadcast by BBC Worldwide
July 27, 200618 yr shakira must be #1 just think, the last ever totp performance and it's by Shakira!! :wub:
July 30, 200618 yr BBC News: .....On 20 June 2006, the show was formally cancelled and it was announced that the last edition would be broadcast on 30 July 2006. Edith Bowman co-presented its hour-long swansong, along with Sir Jimmy Savile (who had presented the first show), Reggie Yates, Mike Read, Pat Sharp, Sarah Cawood, Dave Lee Travis, Rufus Hound, Tony Blackburn and Janice Long. The show was recorded on 26 July 2006 and featured archive footage and tributes, including The Rolling Stones - the very first band to appear on Top of the Pops - opening with The Last Time, the Spice Girls, Wham!, Madonna, Beyoncé Knowles and Robbie Williams. The final artiste on the show was Christina Aguilera introducing her video for Ain't No Other Man, before the show closed with Sir Jimmy turning the lights off in the empty studio. I wonder who is going to be #1 tonight then - Doh! :rolleyes:
July 30, 200618 yr It is quite sad really :( I really used to enjoy it about 5 years ago when it used to be on on a Friday night.
July 30, 200618 yr It's a sad day :( All they had to do was just bring it back to normal rather than axe it -_-
July 30, 200618 yr BBC News: .....On 20 June 2006, the show was formally cancelled and it was announced that the last edition would be broadcast on 30 July 2006. Edith Bowman co-presented its hour-long swansong, along with Sir Jimmy Savile (who had presented the first show), Reggie Yates, Mike Read, Pat Sharp, Sarah Cawood, Dave Lee Travis, Rufus Hound, Tony Blackburn and Janice Long. The show was recorded on 26 July 2006 and featured archive footage and tributes, including The Rolling Stones - the very first band to appear on Top of the Pops - opening with The Last Time, the Spice Girls, Wham!, Madonna, Beyoncé Knowles and Robbie Williams. The final artiste on the show was Christina Aguilera introducing her video for Ain't No Other Man, before the show closed with Sir Jimmy turning the lights off in the empty studio. I wonder who is going to be #1 tonight then - Doh! :rolleyes: Video killed the TV star that started pop culture Top of the Pops, which ends tonight, has drowned in a sea of vapid wall-to-wall music culture, says Giles Hattersley It began in a disused church 42 years ago with a boisterous off-the-cuff performance from the Rolling Stones. Tonight the last Top of the Pops will end with Shakira, a bland sex kitten who got to No 1 via a shrewd multi-media marketing campaign, download sales and a video in which she appears reluctant to keep her top on. Not only is this the story of Top of the Pops, it is also a working analogy for the story of pop culture thus far. “It’s also very ironic,†says Sir Jimmy Savile, nearly 80, who co-created and presented the show for 20 years. “Top of the Pops gave birth to music television and now MTV has finished it off.†By coincidence, in the same week that TOTP lies dying MTV is celebrating its silver jubilee. Twenty-five years ago on Tuesday the station launched by airing the Buggles hit, Video Killed the Radio Star. Did any of the execs patting themselves on the back that day imagine the station would end up killing the show that created it? Today MTV is available in nearly 500m households in 179 countries around the world. It has produced movies, internet sites and even a sobriquet — the MTV Generation, a fluid term for people who (depending on their age) grew up watching either Peter Gabriel, Nirvana or Puff Daddy videos. For these young people MTV was a constant presence, flickering away in the corner of the room in the same familiar way as older generations listen to the radio. And us devotees all have shorter attention spans as a result. However, MTV is going mainstream now. Eight of MTV’s 100 worldwide channels transmit in the UK, providing round-the-clock music clips in every genre from rap to country. The constant candy- coloured sex-drenched videos and celebrity ephemera have become mother’s milk to teenagers who consume media — from Sky+ to Bebo.com without even thinking about it. And, as Savile says, the phenomenal success of the media culture that Top of the Pops created has been instrumental in killing the programme off In the 1970s TOTP really was youth culture. Every week 15m people (most of them teenagers) tuned in to commune with each other and their pop idols. But last month when Jana Bennett, the BBC’s director of television, finally axed the show, fewer than 1m people were watching. Savile waxes lyrical about its glorious origins: “There were no agents and entourages then, no 24- hour music channels. There were just record shops full of singles which people wanted to buy. We realised these people wanted to see who was singing the songs so Barney Colehan, who had created shows such as It’s a Knock Out, called me up and said, ‘Do you fancy doing a TV show of your Radio Luxembourg programme?’ “We only had 10 weeks to prepare and no idea what we were doing. It was common for the Establishment to complain about pop music so nothing like this had ever been done before. There were no rules. It was footsteps in the sand really, but we understood we were going to make history. “On the morning of the first show — January 1, 1964 — I was recovering from the night before, waiting to go down to the studio at four that afternoon. At 11 o’clock I get a call from the police saying the crowd was already building. ‘If you don’t come now we can’t guarantee to get you in, Jim,’ they said. The law had to smuggle me inside, then the Stones, Dusty (Springfield), the Hollies, all these huge people. “Dickenson Road in Manchester was mobbed and the atmosphere was electric. I realised we’d stumbled across something big. We laid a golden pop music egg.†The show’s finale, taped last Wednesday, was by all accounts a far gloomier affair. Fronted by Savile and other past presenters, archive clips of Madonna, Slade and the Spice Girls were played to an audience who were sombre and underwhelmed. Was this any great surprise? For most viewers, any fascination with watching one artist perform one song in a prearranged time slot was long dead. (Particularly as we all know that many of them were — horror — miming to backing tracks anyway.) A far cry, says Savile, from the days when TOTP enchanted the nation. Dads loved Pan’s People, mums loved Rod Stewart, while the kids would debate all the new releases, one of which they might have bought, and which sold so many millions of copies that they still felt deeply significant anyway. Every programme was a “watercooler†moment — before the concept of “event†television had even been invented. “The record sales in those days were just phenomenal, too,†says Savile. “Elvis’s It’s Now or Never sold 1,286,000 copies in this country alone, and the effect that Top of the Pops had on singles was absolutely enormous. All the talent were so delirious to be on a programme that would put 100,000 on their sales overnight.†Those days are long gone and not just because many people now prefer to steal their music electronically rather than buy it in a shop. About 14m people have downloaded music illegally in the UK, with an estimated 20 billion songs traded illegally around the world last year. But the decline in sales wasn’t what did for Top of the Pops. What signed its death warrant were shifting demographics in the music buying public — last year an astonishing 40.9% of all singles were sold to people aged 40 to 59, few of whom will have looked to TOTP for inspiration. “Music is everywhere,†says Savile evenly. “You don’t have to wait a week for a musical television fix any more, you get it every minute of your life and you can buy it right away without caring whether it makes it to No 1 or not. It’s just for you.†He pauses wistfully: “There was a time though, Thursdays at 6.30, when everything stopped.†Now nothing stops. Music channels stream all day, in-boxes ping with record industry gossip, bands rise on MySpace and then tumble the very next day. But sheer technical overload was not the only reason why TOTP expired. In the past, MTV rocketed artists such as George Michael and Britney Spears (remember that schoolgirl outfit?) to prominence by showing their cynical and salacious videos in heavy rotation. But for the past few years its main station has broadcast a steady pulp of reality TV dedicated to the lives of celebrity musicians.
July 30, 200618 yr Just want to tell about My TOTP moment, Even though I never watch on full episode of the series probaly becuase I'm from the US. My favourite TOTP was when T.Rex their classic hit Get It On (Bang A Gong) or as it was called in the US Bang A Gong (Get It On). Three reasons why I remember the performance . 1. Elton John was performing with them on piano. 2. The drummer was doing a poor job of playing the drums at all either because he was drunk or bored of the tune. 3. The background dancers seems to be having a good time dancing but then again they always dance like that whenever someone did a ballad on the series.
July 30, 200618 yr BBC News: .....On 20 June 2006, the show was formally cancelled and it was announced that the last edition would be broadcast on 30 July 2006. Edith Bowman co-presented its hour-long swansong, along with Sir Jimmy Savile (who had presented the first show), Reggie Yates, Mike Read, Pat Sharp, Sarah Cawood, Dave Lee Travis, Rufus Hound, Tony Blackburn and Janice Long. The show was recorded on 26 July 2006 and featured archive footage and tributes, including The Rolling Stones - the very first band to appear on Top of the Pops - opening with The Last Time, the Spice Girls, Wham!, Madonna, Beyoncé Knowles and Robbie Williams. The final artiste on the show was Christina Aguilera introducing her video for Ain't No Other Man, before the show closed with Sir Jimmy turning the lights off in the empty studio. I wonder who is going to be #1 tonight then - Doh! :rolleyes: :blink: :blink: :blink: But Christina is #2 :lol:
July 30, 200618 yr I read that TOTP taped six different endings for the finale last Wednesday One for Shakira, One for Chrisitina, One for Rihanna, One For Lily Allen, One For McFly and One For Madonna. Also TOTP should do a collage of every #1 tune for 1964 to today that was either perfomed on TOTP or had a music video made. I think it would be fun to watch and/or listen to.
July 30, 200618 yr :blink: :blink: :blink: But Christina is #2 :lol: They'll probably have to boot her off the show to show a Shakira performance of Hips Don't Lie. How apt, a brilliant pop record snubbed by Radio1 is the last track on TOTP - that says it all really!!!
July 30, 200618 yr someone find out audience figures for this final programme please when they publish them
July 30, 200618 yr They'll probably have to boot her off the show to show a Shakira performance of Hips Don't Lie. How apt, a brilliant pop record snubbed by Radio1 is the last track on TOTP - that says it all really!!! Yea. BBC fails to embrace all music. It's not Cricket! :lol:
Create an account or sign in to comment