Top of the Pops 12 September 1991

 Words: Chris Arnsby

Simon Mayo: “Hello. Good evening. Welcome to Top of the Pops. Can I say, first of all, if you got your tickets for tonight’s show through Keith Prowse, can you, you can watch this at 7.30, but cheer and applaud louder because you are watching for free. Seem fair enough to me. We’re gonna start at number twenty eight with Bizarre Inc and this is Such A Feeling. Their first time on the show.”

 [28] BIZARRE INC: SUCH A FEELING. Simon Mayo gabbles his introduction. It’s weird. He talks so quickly he seems actually nervous. Maybe this is take three. Maybe he’s struggling to remember his convoluted satirical jab at the Keith Prowse ticket agency, who went into administration on Monday 09/09/1991. I’m not really even sure what his joke is, it’s lost in the word salad.

It doesn’t really matter because this is a great performance. Top of the Pops is getting better at generating visual interest from a few blokes with synthesisers. In this case the three blokes with synthesisers are at the back of the main stage, behind two dancers who are raised on podiums about four feet off stage level. This means they tower over the crowd. Under both podiums are squares of four monitors, at the back of the stage are two more piles of monitors, each a stack of three, each playing the video.

There’s such a range of camera angles on offer. Stanley Appel has the handheld operators dashing all over the place; looking up from underneath at a keyboard player; focusing on the dancers (mainly the lady dancer for some reason); zooming in on the monitors. This is another performance which intercuts with the video but doesn’t need to. There’s more than enough visual material being generated on stage.

I don’t think any camera shot lasts for more than 10 seconds. They pass by almost to quickly to register but here are a couple that stick in my memory; the female dancer, up on the podium with the camera angled so the colour screen is in the background. The result is a feedback effect with the dancer, and her image on the screen, and another image behind her, and so on to infinity. Then there’s a close up of one of the keyboard players which crash zooms backwards to reveal we were looking at him through the legs of the male dancer.

It’s all good. The lighting is great, Mike Manning is back; he was last credited in 1989. Here he angles bright white spotlights to jab through the studio smoke. A couple of them are angled down and Stanley Apple makes sure to get a shots of them firing into the camera lens like lasers. You couldn’t do an entire show like this. It would exhaust the studio crew and the audience but it points the way forwards. This is how you record dance performances. Fast and frantic.

There’s a weird echo to Simon Mayo’s post-Bizarre Inc link. It sounds like they are feeding his audio back through the studio speakers, with a tiny delay.

[13] MARC BOLAN & T.REX: 20^th CENTURY BOY. Promo VT and charts from [40] to [2]. There’s a comment under the 22/08/1991 review, pointing out the fantastic clip of Marc Bolan singing this on Top of the Pops, 01/03/1973, wasn’t complete in the BBC archive in 1991. About one and half minutes existed on a German television programme called Disco ‘73. The remainder was filmed onto Super 8 from a colour TV by Roger Hill and returned to the BBC in 2023. There’s a noticeable change in picture quality when the Disco ‘73 clip ends and the Super 8 footage begins. I didn’t notice this because I didn’t watch far enough when I was quickly checking to see if the performance existed.

[21] ROXETTE: THE BIG L. Promo VT.

[17] SABRINA JOHNSON: PEACE. More great handheld camerawork and lighting. I really like the floor lights Mike Manning has placed behind the dancers, that send rotating beams of lights across the stage.

[20] THE STONE ROSES: I WANNA BE ADORED. Promo VT.

[18] CRYSTAL WATERS: MAKIN’ HAPPY. Promo VT.

[23] CLIFF RICHARD: MORE TO LIFE. Nice gold-lame shirt Cliff, shame about the song. And the dancing.

[14] MARKY MARK & THE FUNKY BUNCH: GOOD VIBRATIONS. Promo VT.

[26] ROZALLA: EVERYBODY’S FREE (TO FEEL GOOD). I’ve really turned around on my opinion of Stanley Appel. His direction on this show has been great. Check out the lovely long tracking shot across the studio towards Rozalla as she belts out one of the “everybody’s freeeeee” bits. And check out the camera work on the musical break (with all the synth stabs). The handheld camera comes in from under one of the bridges (whoever’s controlling it has a very steady hand) and then tracks round Rozalla once, and then quickly whips back in the opposite direction as she turns her back on the crowd and takes off her jacket. It’s all right, she’s wearing a sparkly bikini top underneath. This means Rozalla is facing the camera with the audience visible behind her, and we can see her and the crowds’ delighted reaction to the jacket removal.

BREAKERS

[33] JULIAN LENNON: SALTWATER

[31] SHABA RANKS featuring MAXI PRIEST: HOUSECALL

[25] BRYAN ADAMS: CAN’T STOP THIS THING WE STARTED

[1] BRYAN ADAMS: EVERYTHING I DO (I DO IT FOR YOU). Promo VT. Now at Number One for 10 weeks. Simon Mayo wonders, will it break Slim Whitman’s 1955 record of 11 weeks with Rose Marie? (John - Yes, it will. There's still six more weeks!)

[2] RIGHT SAID FRED: I’M TOO SEXY. Promo VT. Now in it’s fifth of six weeks at [2]. Nicky Campbell next week. “See you sometime,” says Simon Mayo from within the looming shadow of Year Zero.

 BONUS MASTER TAPE BIT. I’m Too Sexy ends and the picture flickers and changes to show a member of the studio crew standing at the front of the Film Strip stage. He’s geeing up the crowd and encouraging them to dance to Gett Off by Prince & The New Power Generation. Who is at the back of the stage? It’s OMD.

“Yaay, marvellous. Marvellous,” somebody says from off screen.

“Cooome on!” shouts the bloke from the studio crew. “Alrightt, keep those arms going. Come on.”

“Keep It. going. Even at the back. Come along, come along. Thank you, thank you” chides the off screen voice. It could be Andy McCluskey, because by now he’s danced to the front of the stage and appears to be talking into his microphone but I don’t think so.
“That’s it, I wanna see those arms right up in the air,” says the bloke from the studio crew.
“Put your arms down. You’re going to get dead tired. You’re gonna get dead tired with your arms stuck up.” Now this could be Andy McClusky. It is difficult to tell because although the voices are all coming from different sources, they’re all routed through the TV screen so there is no obvious source.
There’s a lot of dancing and studio chatter as everyone waits for the start, and then a round of applause from the crowd and Andy McClusky steps forwards to his microphone.
“Come on, let yourselves go. That’s it,” instructs the off screen voice from earlier. Could this be Stanley Appel telling the crowd what to do over the studio speakers?

“Marvellous. Lovely. Super,” says the person who was concerned about arm tiredness earlier. Now I’m not so sure it is Andy McClusky. Then nothing happens. The crowd wind down and Andy McClusky walks to the back of the stage.

“Here we go,” says a new voice in the distance and the crowd cheer again. OMD begin performing Then Turn You Away. A song released in the week of this studio recording which never got higher in the charts than [50]. Making this another one for the Top of the Pops collection of unused performances.

Take one is completed. The sound is turned down and we are looking at the stage through one of the crane cameras. Clearly something is said to the operator of this camera because picture nods up and down in affirmation. Then the sound fades back up, OMD wave at the crowd and wander off.

“Encore. Encore,” shouts someone. The view from the camera wanders round the stage while a member of staff walks onto the stage and starts having a word with someone down the front of the audience.
“Can we have one more time,” asks an off camera voice and the crowd groans, politely. More people wander around on stage as Oceanic’s Insanity booms into the studio. The crowd are waived back from the front of the stage to make room for a camera operator. A white-haired man looks at one of the floor lights. Mike Manning? There’s a lot of pointing at and fiddling with floor lights, this appears to be the reason take one was judged unsatisfactory.

The white-haired bloke goes and stands at Andy McClusky’s microphone, judging light levels. He measures the output of another floor light via the scientific method of waving one leg through the beam. Just as I was thinking you normally don’t get to see this sort of technical fussing around, the picture cuts out. It restarts as OMD come back on stage and take their places. The result of all the light adjustment seems to make Andy McClusky’s white jacket fluoresce, I guess he didn’t look vivid enough.

I spotted a couple of low-level problems with take one. Most notably a handheld camera operator climbing on stage in the back of a shot. He’s now a lot less visible since the lighting was moved around. There was also a slight camera wobble during a long crane pull back, this has been corrected second time around. Take two was presumably acceptable and the recording ends.

 Ratings: [25] 7.53 million viewers. Up from the previous week when the move to Friday didn’t help the ratings. Less good in 1990, fewer viewers than the 6.96 million who watched May to December. Top of the Pops historically got a ratings boost in September when summer ended and the new television season began. This didn’t seem to happen in 1990 and I wonder if this was where the concern about a ratings collapse began, leading of course to Year Zero.

 Countdown to Year Zero revamp: 3.

 Performance of the week:  Bizarre Inc, Such A Feeling.