Top of the Pops 24th October 1991

Reviewed by Chris Arnsby 

Tony Dortie: “Eyes open for a full house. From Elstree it’s Top of the Pops with the biggest and best live. Starting with 2 Unlimited and the busiest dancers around!”

 [2] 2 UNLIMITED: Get Ready For This. This edition opens with a splendid pan round the side of the Mess stage looking towards the Cyclorama stage. Rod Litherland works his usual magic with lights and smoke and points a bank of white lights at equipment hanging down from the ceiling to once again create a sort of Close Encounters look.

The Cyclorama stage… I’m going to start calling the Cyclorama stage the Cyc stage because it a) saves a lot of typing and b) it makes me sound like a TV insider… the Cyc stage is packed. It looks like there are about 15 people on there, two groups clustered around the wings and a few more in the middle. It turns out, some of the audience have been allowed on stage. This is frequently risky but these people have been well briefed. They are there to bounce around, look enthusiastic, and have fun! They accomplish this with aplomb, although they get less bouncy as the song goes on because they don’t have the stamina.

A tip of le chapeau to Ian Simpson, who is doing the video effects. He turns on the same false colour effect used a couple of weeks ago on Carl Cox. It still looks good. Also looking good, the trick cross-fade vision mixer Julie Mann uses at the end of the song. The one where a camera pulls back and the picture is cross-faded to a second camera looking at a monitor showing the output of camera one, to give the impression the camera has moved back and out of a TV. First used on the 03/10/1991 edition.

Top 10. Tony Dortie introduces this edition in voice over and Mark Franklin gets his face and caption on screen first. I should keep track of this to make sure they both get equal billing (you don’t want any arguments among the Talent).

03/10/1991. Mark Franklin introduced the show and he and Tony Dortie shared the first caption together (ahhh).

10/10/1991. Tony Dortie introduces and Mark Franklin gets the first appearance.

17/10/1991. Mark Franklin introduces and Tony Dortie appears on camera first. So far, they’ve remembered to alternate correctly. I wonder how long it will take to get the sequence messed up?

ALBUm ChArt. [3] KENNY THOMAS: Voices. It feels like Kenny Thomas is on every other week. He’s not but this is the second time this month. The energy whiplash between the first song and this is considerable.

[6] VIC REEVES & THE WONDER STUFF. Dizzy. Vic Reeves is pushing the live vocal rule to breaking point. I’m pretty sure he forgets the words a couple of times. I’m afraid everyone is very, very drunk. As Vic Reeves and Miles Hunt told The Story of 1991.

Vic Reeves: “Miles… said: ‘what we do, when we do Top of the Pops, we have a tequila shot. You do that and then thirty seconds in you’re gonna feel great and have, like, a big energy burst’. So we did that. Went on, and then the director said: ‘Stop. There’s dry ice in the room and Mariah Carey has insisted that she can’t have dry ice anywhere near her.’

Miles Hunt: “We were all sent back to our dressing rooms. Now we’re on beers in the dressing rooms and then we all go back to the side of the stage and we insist that we have to do tequila because now it’s become a ritual.”

Vic Reeves: “Course, by the time we did it. We were all well oiled.”

[19] QUEEN: The Show Must Go On. Promo VT.

[4] KIRI TE KANAWA: World In Union. This is another opportunity to show the flexibility of the new studio space. Dame Kiri is not going to be bustin’ shapes so there’s not much point in putting her on one of the stages. Instead they’ve put her on a podium surrounded by the kids in the crowd; who look slightly awkward but remain on good behaviour.

Obviously I’ve wasted way too much time trying to work out exactly where she is in the studio. I’m pretty sure the studio is a rectangle. The Mess stage and the Wonka stage sit opposite each other on the long edges. The Cyc stage is at one end, and if you stood on it you would have the Mess stage to your left and the Wonka stage to your right, and down the far end of the studio you would see the Scaffolding stage.

Dame KT’s podium is just in front of the Cyc stage and flags of several nations have been hung from the lighting grid. I spent a while trying to see if I could spot the flags or podium in place while 2 Unlimited were performing but I think everything was either set up in a quick recording break, or while Vic Reeves was feeling dizzy on the Scaffolding stage.

[16] CARTER- U.S.M. :After The Watershed. There’s a very snazzy transition from DKT’s performance into Carter. The camera circles her and in the background a screen comes into life which seems to be showing a test card. The camera movement reveals a whole wall of televisions set into the Wonka stage. What looks like a test card is actually the cover to After The Watershed. The bulk of the screens play bits of the After The Watershed promo and then pictures of fractals and other things that aren’t in the promo. It’s clearly specially created footage. I wonder who supplies material like this, the record company? Did they also bring along the tellies?

Regardless of where the TV’s came from, it’s another demonstration of how the stages can be made to look a bit different with little effort (see also, the wall of washing machines behind Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff). I don’t think the podiums in TC3 would have supported their weight.

U.S. ChArT: [1] MARIAH CAREY: Emotions. There’s a sneaky edit here. After The Watershed comes to an end and the camera zooms in on the wall of screens and the picture defocuses. There’s a slow cross-fade to a different defocused shot of a disco ball and a new camera zooms back to reveal Mariah Carey already in song.

“Causing mayhem everywhere,” says Tony Dortie in voice over. I have no idea what he’s talking about unless he’s referring to her dry ice ban.

[36] SIMPLE MINDS: Real Life

[28] DON McLEAN: American Pie

[13] PET SHOP BOYS: DJ Culture

ExcLUsIVe: TIN MACHINE: Baby Universal. Back to the Cyc stage for the last studio performance this week. The stage has been set up in full rock concert mode with banks of lights forming walls of light through the studio smoke.

This is the first time the ExcLUsIVe tag has been used on a studio performance rather than a video. Julie Mann jumps between camera angles during the introduction of the song. I think all six cameras are being used. It’s clear either Arch Dyson or Stanley Appel regards this as the highlight of the show.

Projectors shine pictures on the cyclorama behind. The effect looks oddly like light shining through a window. The projected pictures are actually of the four Greek statues from the Tin Machine II album cover with one important omission; four actually. Their genitals, so eye-catching on the album cover, have been smoothed out. These statues have been Action Man-ed. Nudey Greek statues are fine for the sort of filth you’d watch on Channel 4 but a prime time BBC audience expects everything to be a little smoother.

[1] BRYAN ADAMS: (Everything I Do) I Do It For You. Promo VT.
Goodbyes: Genesis will be in the studio next week to preview their new song No Son Of Mine.

 Ratings: A drop of 600,000 viewers from last week takes the ratings south of 8 million but 7.73 million was good enough to get Top of the Pops to [23]. In 1990 the ratings were lower than the 7.80 million achieved by In Sickness and in Health.

 Performance of the week: Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff, Dizzy.