Musical Thoughts: Top Of The Pops

This week Joe West looks at the rumours that Top of the Pops is making a come back and asks, do we really want it?..

It was briefly reported this week that redundant chart show Top of the Pops would be coming out of retirement to act as a digital supplement to the weekly top 40 countdown on Radio One. However, station controller Ben Cooper was quick to make a statement claiming that this video-based online chart show will not actually bear the Top of the Pops branding. Instead it will basically be a live feed from the studio in which Rastamouse vocalist Reggie Yates presents the charts on Sunday, presumably with some acts actually invited to perform their hits live, with music videos also included.

Now Mr Cooper is quoted by NME as making the following statement about the new online elements of the chart show:

“I hope that this will be to our young listeners what listening to the chart and waiting to record your favourite pop songs was for another generation.”

This is probably about right, but I’m upset that he didn’t use the phrase ‘kids these days’ or ‘don’t even know they’re born’ at any point, because I like to imagine that a middle aged man is being force to run Radio One and is thus doing it in the most begrudging way possible.

I’m quite glad that Top of the Pops is being allowed to linger in obscurity. Not only has the internet made it irrelevant, but its title couldn’t be more archaic. It’s not as if people refer to the charts as the ‘Pops’ and wonder each week who will be on top of them. You’ll never hear one teenager say to another “One Direction are climbing the Pops at the moment with their new single ‘Stop Masturbating To Our Posters’”.

It also stirred up memories in me of my early addiction to popular music. I remember my first time crouched over a tape deck trying to record the charts back in the 1990s. I made the mistake of assuming that I would be able to predict when a song would start and stop, which was of course impossible. It just meant that I ended up with a cassette packed with lots of different songs, both the beginning AND the end of which were jarringly guillotined to the point of being essentially unlistenable.

The TV iteration of Top of the Pops still holds nostalgic significance for me, because it was a kind of family event during those twilight years between the times I learnt to feed without the aid of a breast and eventually discovered the other uses/benefits of this particular appendage. Sometimes there would be men with guitars and songs about the nature of melancholy. More often there would be women with their midriffs revealed, causing an uneasy and little understood chemical reaction in my brain and penis. This was more of a problem when it was Usher. One time there was even Aaron Carter with an inflatable guitar, which was terribly post-modern of him.

Some cummdgeons (like Radio One controller Ben Cooper) will secretly think that by going online the communal elements of Tops of the Pops which you could experience when watching with your family will be absent from the streamed chart show. But these luddites are incorrect. Because although teenagers, and a surprising number of people in their 20s and 30s, will be watching alone in their rooms, the presence of interactive elements and social networking integration will more than compensate for being unable to hear your mum misremember the words to ‘Say What You Want’ by Texas.