Top of the Pops 11 August 1983

Reviewed by Chris Arnsby. Richard Skinner: "Welcome to another exciting Top of the Pops. What a show we've got for you tonight." Tommy Vance: "We certainly have. Now in America David Grant's Stop and Go is zooming up the charts. Over here he's just outside the top thirty with this record Watching You Watching Me, and watch him dance!"

[34] David Grant: Watching You Watching Me. I feel I'm missing some important historical context with regard to David Grant's dancing ability. He's good but Top of the Pops seems to believe he's Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire rolled into one. Look at the way he's choreographed to beckon the camera to follow him while he dances towards the audience and jumps on a podium. Still fair play to David Grant, that podium is about 2-3 feet high and he makes it with a single leap. I just tried jumping onto a sideboard and hurt my hip. Conclusion: David Grant is a better dancer than me. Unusually for Top of the Pops there's a poorly timed cut from veteran of Top of the Pops Vision Mixer Heather Gilder. David Grant jumps into the air and does the splits, and the camera cuts away to assorted Zoo dancers, then the audience cheers and gives a round of applause. Were the cheers for the jump, or did David Grant do something even more impressive? We'll never know.

Peter Rabbit film review

When I was a child I have to admit the Peter Rabbit books were not really to my taste despite their classic status. The idea of reimagining them for a modern sensibility however has truly brought them alive in more ways than one. This sassy, funny, fast movie is perfect for kids of all ages though I’m not sure it will help sell the books to a new generation. It’s now available to watch at home on your chosen format but watch it you should if you have any sense of fun or silliness!

Top of the Pops 28 July 1983

Reviewed by Chris Arnsby. Janice Long: "Hello and welcome to Top of the Pops. It's a good one tonight because we've got people like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Lotus Eaters, and Bananarama." Mike Read: "And KC, of KC and the Sunshine Band having his twelfth British hit."

[19] KC & The Sunshine Band: Give It Up. Try not to think about Mike Read's vile snot-green short-shorts and I'll try not to keep harping on about them. Hopefully any camera shots of Mike Read will be above the plimsoll line and I can pretend he's wearing trousers. I'd also like to dispute Mike Read's use of statistics. Twelfth British hit? I've got nothing against KC & The Sunshine Band, but that's a charitable description of their chart history. Hot foot from Wikipedia I can tell you that Give It Up is  KC & The Sunshine band's thirteenth UK single and if we are playing by Top of the Pops rules (top thirty) then only six of their singles count as hits. I've kind of lost the thread of what I was going on about there, but the important thing is I've proved Mike Read wrong on a 35 year old minor point. Meanwhile, studio lighting grid fans will be delighted by several low-angled shots which show the studio clock and illuminated TRANSMISSION sign. Sadly, the clock is slightly too out of focus to see the time. It's almost as if the people making Top of the Pops don't care about this sort of stuff.

KC- That jacket mate- give it up!

World Contact Day

What did you do on 15 March this year? Did you perhaps attempt to communicate telepathically with aliens inviting them to come to our planet? If you did then you’d be celebrating World Contact Day an annual event in which people are invited to try and persuade `occupants of Interplanetary craft` or indeed those gas based lifeforms that don’t need spaceships at all to come to Earth. “We are your friends” goes the slightly unconvincing mantra. Established in 1953 by an organisation called the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB) it is based on the theory that if there is alien life out there in the Universe and if telepathy is real (admittedly a couple of especially giant leaps) then if a lot of people focus on a single message it will send a powerful signal through the ether. 

Albert Bender, founder of World Contact Day. World Giant Cigar Day however did not catch on.

The Play That Goes Wrong review

This is the play that started it all for Mischief Theatre, their original production that first viewed the public and critics alike nearly five years ago now and it remains an essential watch if you’ve not seen it. It is a deceptively straight forward production too, using just one set and I can imagine other people thinking they might have a go at something similar. Yet this is a masterpiece of timing and tone. It takes the elements of live theatre and then has them go wrong enough to amuse us yet not so wrong as to lose the shape of the production, The cast play it absolutely straight- except in moments where their character playing a character wants to acknowledge the audience.  Cos that’s the really clever bit- we’re actually watching actors playing poor actors appearing in a play. 

Ad Break #4 Monday, Home, Winners

BT Plus- Blue Monday (evening)

This is a gem of an ad, perfectly aligning sound and vision. We follow a girl – called Heather apparently- walking through the city in the evening on her way to meet someone and soundtracked by the classic New Order song `Blue Monday`. Which would be fine as it goes but the really impressive thing is the way various passers- by and happenings match every beat of the song and this is a song with a lot of beats. So as she leaves her flat the man on the tv is saying the same line from the song we can hear, outside a delivery man knocks three times in sync with the music and so on.

Top of the Pops 12 and 19 May 1983

Reviewed by Chris Arnsby. 12/05/83 - Tommy Vance: "Edition 1001 of Top of the Pops! Good evening and welcome!" Mike Read: "Great party record to start off with, Modern Romance's Don't Stop That Crazy Rhythm."Tommy Vance: "Woo!"
(Edition 1000: It's worth tracking down the few snippets of edition 1000 currently on Youtube. There's a lovely introduction with Richard Skinner and Diddy David Jacobs in which Richard Skinner comes across as a far more relaxed and natural broadcaster than he does when he's hosting Top of the Pops. He's sitting down for this introduction so maybe he should always be allowed a chair from now on when he's in studio.)

[26] Modern Romance: Don't Stop That Crazy Rhythm. Everything's different. New sets. New title sequence. Same pool of presenters of course which is one of the reasons BBC4 has jumped from edition 999 to 1001. Modern Romance are appearing on the main studio stage -the one with banks of raised rostra behind the performance area for the audience, or Top of the Pops cheerleaders- and a couple of wide shots reveal that the makeover is more superficial than it first appears. The geography of the set is the same. The black and white Eidophor screen is still on the left, and the neon Top of the Pops logo is on the right. The main difference is the replacement of  the large metallic arches with ranks of scaffold-like scenery. Bolted to the set are circular neon elements that echo the shape of the Top of the Pops logo, but have a diagonal line coming out of the bottom right that makes them Q-shaped. The most significant effect of the new scenery is to form a definite wall. The arches used to open onto a black backcloth which made it look like Top of the Pops was being broadcast from a formless black vortex. Now it's clearly located in a television studio. Joining Modern Romance is a middle aged dancer who looks like someone's uncle has rushed the stage; he's dressed in blue with a backwards red baseball cap perched on his head. He's named-checked by Tommy Vance as "Will Gaines," and a quick Google search reveals he's a much more significant figure in dance than his treatment here would make you think. John Bishop's direction excludes him and the audience at home don't get a good look until the instrumental. Maybe John Bishop intended the reveal of the tap dancer to be a surprise, but it comes across more as an attempt at exclusion. It's as if Modern Romance turned up with Will Gaines and insisted he perform with them, but the Director had other plans. If you really want to see Will Gaines strut his stuff then head over to Youtube and watch the clip of him dancing on The Arthur Haynes Show.

Could the Copyright Directive destroy the Internet?

Later this month the European Union will vote on changes to the Copyright Directive, a 2001 act designed to protect copyright holders in the digital age. However an amendment called Article 13 has crept into this vote and has repercussions for anyone online. With much of the current debate distracted by GDPR, data breaches and Facebook this seems to be happening under most people’s radar. I’d not heard about it till this week when some media outlets began flagging it up. The consensus amongst commentators is that, at best, these amendments are flawed and at worst could cause all sorts of repercussions from stopping memes to causing Wikipedia and YouTube to close or even as one site put it “destroy the Internet as we know it”.