Top of the Pops 3rd October 1991

Reviewed by Chris Arnsby

“Welcome to a fresh new look Top of the Pops from our new studio in Elstree. To open our show tonight, Erasure.”

 [4] ERASURE: Love To Hate You. That uncredited voice over doesn’t have the impact it needs. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the sound quality so I’ll use the word muffled. I think it is being recorded in the studio where it has been played through speakers. This stops it booming like the wrath of god, which is what is needed. I guess the mix of studio audio is being carefully balanced to take into account Erasure’s backing track.

I am also not sure the opening shot sells the new studio. It’s clearly massive. You couldn’t pull off a crane shot like that in TC3 but a huge space needs a huge crowd to go with it, and obviously the BBC doesn’t want to wrangle a huge crowd of twentysomethings on the first night. This means my first impression of the new studio is of a space that is cavernous but a bit empty.

All this sounds negative. I don’t want it to be. If this was the all-old Top of the Pops I’d be raving about how great it looked. Top of the Pops does what it did previously but bigger. Arch Dyson plays with a mix of cranes and handheld cameras. Rod Litherland makes the lighting colourful and dynamic. Paul Hains (credited with design so I’m going to assume he did the new sets) has created a stage with towered wings where members of the audience can dance (and I love the brief camera shot that pushes through the dancers to look down at Erasure). It’s like Top of the Pops USA but in London.

I really like the camera shot at the end. The one that pulls back and is carefully mixed by Priscilla Hoadley to look like it continues back in a straight line out of a monitor. This is how the new hosts are revealed. Meet Tony Dortie and Mark Franklin. They are stood on the stage-left wing of the Erasure stage. In other words, the camera moved in a straight line but in the geography of the studio we are at 90 degrees to where the original camera was looking as it pulled back.

Maybe this would have been the moment to reveal the scale of the new studio. Instead it is blocked behind a naff version of the new logo which fills a third of the screen, and is mostly lost because the metal effect logo blends in too much like the scaffolding of the set. But I’m in danger of sounding a negative again. Sort out the sound problems (both the hosts sound muffled and echoey (how does that even happen?) and things will be great).

Top 10. The new look Top 10 Countdown doesn’t work. It needs a voice over. It is also clearly silly to spoil the Number One song less than five minutes into the show. Mind you, in 1991 everyone knew Bryan Adams was still at the top so maybe Stanley Appel will shift the countdown further back in the programme when the Number One finally changes. Interesting to note the (difficult to see) clips on the countdown all come from videos, except for Oceanic where we see a brief bit of their performance from the 19/09/1991 show.

[25] VOICE OF THE BEEHIVE: I Think I Love You. Tony Dortie takes a walk through the crowd to introduce Voice Of The Beehive. It’s a good call to end the practice of keeping the crowd at a distance and make them part of the programme again.

This stage is also massive. It looks like one wall of the studio has simply been covered with a white cyclorama that is coloured by studio lights and projected yellow heart shapes. The studio infostructure has been kept visible so there are lots of lights and ladders and poles, and at the back of the stage is a tall podium with steps up to it where the drummer has been placed.

There’s something about the plain background and sharp lines that evokes a Mod style. This stage makes me think of the sixties while the Erasure stage, with its fussy geometric white scaffolding, had quite an eighties vibe. I wonder if all the stages have been designed to evoke different decades? 

[22] KENNY THOMAS: Best Of You. The camera pull back at the end of I Think I Love You brings a third new stage into focus. Waiting there is Kenny Thomas and his band who immediately launch into Best Of You with only a voice over to introduce them. Interesting idea. It keeps the pace of the show moving but it must be a nightmare to choreograph. If something went wrong in the early moments of Kenny Thomas’ performance you’d need to get Voice Of The Beehive back on stage to do, at least, the last moments of their performance so the two could remain linked.

Kenny Thomas’ stage looks like something stolen from Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, all perspex tubes and cylinders. There goes my “themed by decades” idea. I’m pretty sure this isn’t seventies or nineties themed. Or is it? Please leave a comment if you were trapped in a test tube in the early nineties.

[20] BELINDA CARLISE: Live Your Life (Be Free). There’s another continuous shot from Kenny Thomas back to the Erasure stage. I’m a bit worried that Top of the Pops is reusing a stage already. Surely they have more than three?

Belinda Carlisle stands next to Mark Franklin who makes an attempt to explain some of the new rules for the show: “Now, Top of the Pops now can play any record in the US Top Ten because they are all eligible for this new look programme. And this week there are no British artists in that Top Ten. But we don’t worry about that because they’ve come to us. Belinda Carlise releases her fourth album in two years next week….”

Wha? I don’t understand what any of this has to do with Belinda Carlise who is neither a British artist or in the US Top 10, but is in the UK Top 40 at [20]. Something has clearly got garbled on the journey from Mark Franklin’s brain to my ears.

Anyway this leads into an All-New Top of the Pops patented 20 second interview which isn’t an improvement on the All-Old Top of the Pops patented 20 second interviews. Belinda Carlisle seems tense. It may just be nerves, or she may also not understand the rules about what Top of the Pops is allowed to play, or maybe this is take three of the transition between stages and she wants to go to the loo.

[ToTp] STEVIE WONDER: Fun Day. Promo VT. Tony Dortie has snuck into the crowd in front of Belinda Carlise to take part in another clever transition. As the camera pans down at the end of the song, he turns round to face the camera and walks out of the crowd.

He explains that each week Top of the Pops will be showing “exclusive videos”. They’ve even worked up a little banner that slides in from the side of the screen; I’m not sure if I can do justice to the exciting nineties typography but it kind of looks like this: EXCLUSIVe.
I’ve put a lot of work into the formatting there but I don’t know if it will transfer from a Word document to the internet, so apologies if you just end up looking at regular text or weird characters. There’s also a special [ToTp] icon to go on the caption. It replaces the chart position because Fun Day has yet to chart. Unfortunately when it does, it gets no higher than [68]. Let’s hope future exclusives do better.

[10] JULIAN LENNON: Saltwater. New stage. This one is… a bit of a mess. There are curved neon tubes, a giant mirror ball, and assorted curved and blobby bits of scenery that look like Henry Moore ran riot with a fibreglass extruder. In a rare failure for Rob Litherland, he’s coloured the whole stage purple which makes it difficult to get any sense of what you are looking at.

Vision mixer Priscilla Hoadley builds a couple of composite pictures using a soft-edged overlay to put a close up profile of Julian Lennon next to a wider shot of him playing the keyboard. It’s simple but effective. Hopefully it points to the use of more and bolder electronic effects in the future.

[10] STATUS QUO: Rock Till You Drop. Welcome to the dawning of a brave new era with Status Quo, the band who never say no to a Top of the Pops invitation. Status Quo are allowed in because they are at [10] in the album chart (for one week only so this performance didn’t do them a lot of good), and Top of the Pops covers the album charts now Grandad.

Status Quo are back on the same stage as Voice of the Beehive but the cyclorama has been drawn back and a wall of amplifiers has been built (or were they hidden behind the cyclorama for a quick stage change?) The stage looks great. I could believe it was designed for widescreen televisions. It gives a proper outdoor stadium-rock look to the performance. All these huge stages look fantastic when filled with a band, or Erasure and their dancers, but how will it look when its two blokes prodding their synthesisers? Or will those bands be exiled to the messy Julian Lennon stage which is considerably smaller and more like what you’d see at Television Centre?

BREAKERS

[31] D.J. CARL COX: I Want You (Forever)

[30] MONTY PYTHON: Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

That Topup tHse POOp logo in full

[1] BRYAN ADAMS: (Everything I Do) I Do It For You. Promo VT. No Top 40 then? The programme seems a little empty without it although I appreciate it gives space for more music and makes the production easier because you are saving the time it would take to put it together.

There’s also no closing video, instead we get an extended version of the title sequence, with no dancers, and some new credits; Tony Gibber wrote the new theme; Paul Gambaccini is a consultant; and John Bishop is executive producer. Who is John Bishop, well he was mainly a Light Entertainment producer. He worked on The Russ Abbot Show, Bob’s Full House, Blankety Blank, and he also directed a few episodes of Top of the Pops from 1981 to 1983. Why does Top of the Pops suddenly need an executive producer? Maybe it’s to help with the move from Television Centre to Elstree?

 Snap verdict on the new look? A cautious thumbs up. My big worry is the requirement for people to sing live. Andy Bell is quite constrained by this. He’s a good singer but the live vocal stops him from dancing as much as he would normally.

Ratings: Up, as you’d hope. There must have been sighs of relief in the office when Top of the Pops charted at [19] with 8.93 million viewers. That’s a million more than watched the programme in September. It’s also good compared to 1990 when the show didn’t chart and ended up with less viewers than the 7.73 million who saw Telly Addicts.

 Performance of the week: Voice of the Beehive, I Think I Love You.