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23/12/2023

Top of the Pops - 22 December 1988

 

Words: Chris Arnsby
Steve Wright: “Hi!! Good evening!! To!! Radio One listeners!! And BBC1 viewers!! How are you tonight!! I'm Steve Wright!! Here's Nicky Campbell!!”
Nicky Campbell: “A great show tonight. We've got Neneh Cherry. Kim Wilde. Jason and Kyie. We start off tonight with a bunch of guys who've been in the business longer than Steve Wright. It's The Four Tops.”

 [15] FOUR TOPS: loco in acapulco. One of those lighting in a bottle moments when the atmosphere in the studio lifts a performance and makes it something great. The Four Tops are clearly having a great time -they've come in specially from Detroit according to Steve Wright- and they look impossibly sharp in their red suits, black shirts and black shoes. I've got a soft spot for the second Top from the left. He looks absolutely delighted to be there and he's really hamming it up. The best bit of the performance comes in the instrumental. The four Tops scatter across the stage to face different parts of the crowd and do their own thing, to whoops of approval.




Brian Whitehouse takes the Produced and Directed By credit. Paul Ciani is away? He's only been back one week. To be fair he's probably off preparing for the Christmas Day special which airs three days after this one, at 2pm between Eastenders and HM The Queen. The following week there's no Top of the Pops on Thursday. There's a Bros Special at 7pm instead (Executive Produced by Janet Street-Porter who apparently hasn't heard that Bros are over). Où est le Top des Pops? C'est ici, Saturday 31/12/1988. Part of BBC1's New Years Eve line up, at 17.20 between The News and Bob's Full House. It's a 70 minute special, also Produced and Directed by Paul Ciani, so I guess the poor bloke deserves one day off at Christmas.

[20] A-HA: you are the one. A sneaky pre-record. But can I work out when? Yes. I think so. It turns out there's a surprisingly good clue provided by the neon tubes and lighting in the area around the Radio 1 logo; above the gap between the new Record Needle stage and the main stage. It's lit differently for each recording and I just need to find an earlier show that matches; in this case I'm looking for red and blue neon tubes, plus the red neon round the Radio 1 logo is turned on and the logo is dimly lit. Here we go. That matches 01/12/1988. In this course of doing this I also worked out that Inner City's performance of Goodlife (15/12/1988) was recorded as part of the 08/12/1988 studio. Although in that case they tried to trick me by turning off the red neon around the Radio 1 logo for Inner City and then turning it back on when Cliff Richard used the same stage.



TOP 40 FROM 40 TO 31

[19] KIM WILDE: four letter word. It is love. Do you understand?

BREAKERS: [28 SHAKIN' STEVENS true love]; [27 FREIHEIT keeping the dream alive].

[13] NENEH CHERRY: buffalo stance. Neneh is joined by two dancers who do an odd rag doll dance routine. Neneh Cherry was seven months pregnant at the time of this performance, follow up media coverage appears to have viewed this through the frame of medieval medicine. Wikipedia quotes the following exchange, “When asked by a reporter if it was safe for her to go on stage and perform, Cherry answered: "Yes, of course! It's not an illness.” Apparently the reporter was worried all that music would make the child a carrier of the Strasbourg Dancing Plague.



TOP 40 FROM 30 TO 11. Nicky Campbell does a cod-German accent when the chart gets to Freiheit at [27]. Who had money on Steve Wright not being the most embarrassing host tonight?

TOP 40 FROM 30 TO 11.

[2] KYLE MINOGUE & JASON DONOVAN: especially for you. Bletch.

TOP 10.

[1] CLIFF RICHARD: mistletoe & wine. A repeat of the 08/12/1988 performance.

[7] STATUS QUO: burning bridges. Also a repeat from 08/12/1988. The Christmas Day Top of the Pops will be hosted by Bruno Brookes, Anthea Turner, and Gary Davies, not that Nicky Campbell or Steve Davis can be bothered to pass this information on. I had to look it up myself.

Here's the question. How did Top of the Pops know the Christmas Day Number One? Back in October 1987 Gallup changed to updating the charts on Sunday, and in 1988 Christmas Day was a Sunday. Would Gallup really rush compile the data on Christmas Day for Top of the Pops to use at 2pm?

I think there's some editorial slight of hand going on here. The Christmas Top of the Pops clearly isn't live (no, really) and doesn't contain any charts. When the programme gets to Cliff Bloody Richard, Gary Davies describes Mistletoe and Wine as “our number one.” Not the UK's or this week's or the Christmas Number one, but “our”. That's a fascinating weasel word to use. Was that to be the fig-leaf coverage if the Gallup data later revealed Cliff not to be the Christmas Number One? It didn't matter. He was*. Bah! Humbug!

 *Also, lazy Cliff Richard couldn't be bothered to turn up for the recording of the Christmas Special. Top of the Pops had to run the 08/12/1988 footage again.

PERFORMANCE OF THE WEEK: The Four Tops, Loco in Acapulco and Neneh Cherry, Buffalo Stance. Merry Christmas.

 

1 comment:

  1. The Four Tops may have looked in high spirits during that performance, but behind the scenes there was strife with Paul Ciani forcing them to stay longer against their wishes and record another performance as part of the sessions for the 25th Anniversary edition. Though the band wanted to simply pre-record their appearance as part of this show, Ciani purportedly wouldn't back down and made them stay behind. Yet what they didn't know was that he was inadvertently saving their lives - because they had to cancel their return tickets on Pan Am Flight 103 as a result.

    The odd thing is however, there are a few pre-records used as part of that anniversary show; Cliff did one during the sessions for the 08/12 edition, and Lulu did another during the following week's. But these were both done on the pre-existing 'record needle' set... while The Four Tops performed on the main stage, which was notably replaced to commemorate the 25th and imminent branding refresh at the start of 1989, so Ciani presumably didn't want these two sets to clearly clash on-screen.

    (Source on that first part: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-37713546)

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