I applied for a secretarial job at the BBC, but when I said I was interested in theatre, music and entertainment, they said I'd be useful in TV production. I was gobsmacked. I started off on Grandstand then, in 1965, was seconded to Top of the Pops, which had been launched to rival ITV's already successful Ready, Steady, Go!
The hit parade, as the charts were called then, had always been dominated by US acts. But suddenly we had the Beatles, the Stones – and swinging London. Although our office was there, the first shows were filmed in Dickenson Road, Manchester, in an old church with a spireWe'd scour the city's clubs looking for kids to be in the audience.
To get on the show, bands had to be in the top 30 and rising up the charts. Pluggers would bug me like crazy to get their acts on. It was like a big party sometimes, with so many people crammed into the control room that the caption scanner, which rolled the opening credits, would get stuck.
At first, stars mimed along to their own songs, but then the Musicians' Union objected, saying this was doing people out of a job. So the BBC struck a deal whereby acts could mime over a new backing track, recorded with the cream of London session musicians or an orchestra. That aside, the first shows were live. If there was a mistake, the whole country saw it. For one act – I think it was Wilson Pickett – the lights didn't come on, and he was left standing there miming in the dark.
One of my jobs was to write out lyrics and work out who was singing, so the camera could zoom in on them. When Sonny & Cher did I Got You Babe, I'd got them the wrong way round. I hadn't realised the higher voice was Sonny's.
I loved the job so much I used to pinch myself and think: "God, I'm getting paid for this." I remember watching David Bowie miming along to Space Oddity in a silver catsuit behind a big plate of glass. And when John Lennon and Yoko Ono did Instant Karma, everyone thought Yoko was wearing a napkin over her eyes as a blindfold. It was actually a sanitary towel.
Stanley Appel, producer, 1990sBy the early 1990s, Top of the Pops was losing ratings so I was brought in for what became known as The Year Zero Revamp. I'd started on the show as a cameraman in 1966. In those days, the Musicians' Union rep was known as Doctor Death, but I was against the miming, too. I thought it was cheating. So I decided people had to sing live, meaning you got a performance without all the studio gloss. One person who really didn't like the change was Pete Waterman, whose acts, shall we say, benefited more than most from studio enhancement.
We moved into a larger permanent studio. It had a specialist rock area with its own lighting rig, which meant you got some great performances, visually. Audience research suggested people were fed up with Radio 1 DJs, so we got rid of them, held auditions and recruited a team of young, vibrant unknowns, including Femi Oke and Mark Franklin. It seemed to work. They were exciting because they were so keen. I'm not sure viewers were ever that bothered, though. They just wanted to see the bands.
Kids would write in and happily wait months for tickets to a single show. We'd hold dancing competitions among them and put the winners in prominent positions. One time, we were offered a world exclusive: the video to Michael Jackson's Black or White. However, it was 11 minutes long – and our programme was just 30. The BBC initially said we couldn't possibly show it, but they eventually relented. I got the impression my boss had mentioned it to his kids, and they'd said: "You can't say no to Michael Jackson!"
I was sent over to LA to view the video. One scene had Michael smashing a car to pieces with a baseball bat. I said: "This is gratuitous violence. We can't show that on the BBC!" He was the biggest pop star in the world. Top of the Pops was probably the only show allowed to edit Michael Jackson.
Had I collected autographs, I'd have the most amazing collection ever, but we were just there to do our jobs. I don't know if it was the right decision to end the show in 2006 after 42 years. It's sad that there's so little pop on TV today. On a Thursday night, Top of the Pops night, I still get that tingle.
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