Top of the Pops

Sorry this is late, I'm not with it.

Michael Hurll liked John Peel, and he also enjoyed Peel's comments, that's why he used him. Call it dry wit, or sarcasm, John was the perfect antidote to the bland over eager to please style presentation, although i'm not sure the live breaking wind remark would have gone down quite as well with Hurll.

I think it is clear by the latter shows John wasn't enjoying presenting the show particularly, and he wasn't even attempting at times to appear humorous. He'd gone past that stage. I think he was just fed up with how bad many of the chart sounds were. I would imagine anyone who was a genuine music fan, and even among his fellow presenters, must have felt equally frustrated. However, many of the other presenters were only too pleased in maintaining their own high profiles, and that was enough to keep them happy, unless you were Peter Powell, who threw in the towel when Steve 'Silk' Hurley's ''Jack Your Body'' reached no 1.

As Peel and Long mentioned in interviews, Michael Hurll was actually in Australia that week - as you could see, the episode was produced by Brian Whitehouse - and he was phoned after the show, in the middle of the night there, to be told what Peel had said, and he said he wasn't at all bothered.

I would disagree with the suggestion Peel wasn't enjoying doing the show, obviously he enjoyed that Pete Wylie track and he had such a wide taste in music. In the late eighties he was playing Kylie on his radio show, because he'd met her and thought she was lovely (there was an interview where he said people said you shouldn't let personal considerations colour your playlist, and he said that was a ridiculous opinion as he wasn't a robot and if he liked them, he'd play it). He was also the first person to play Wham on the radio - "the excellent Wham", as he called them in 1983.

Obviously if he wasn't enjoying doing Pops he'd have stopped doing it, as mentioned he decided to stop doing it in 1987 of his own volition - he said people used to point at him in the street and say he was "that bloke off the telly" and he didn't really like that. And Michael Hurll was clearly very supportive because in the mid-80s he wasn't having the best time at Radio 1 (he'd just gone down from four to three shows a week, much to his dismay) and you would assume if Radio 1 had the choice they'd have had their big daytime stars every week, but Hurll kept on using Peel wherever possible.

And there were loads of brilliant records in the chart in 1986, I'm really enjoying it at the moment. This Thursday's episode begins with an absolute banger I've been waiting for them to get to for ages.

Doesn't sound like it was the first time he'd played it, but this is brilliant from Peel.....

Yes, Peel had a wide taste in music, but i don't think it is merely taste when it comes to the sounds of 1986. There seems something more fundamentally missing.

Peel, of course, did stand down in 1987. However, he didn't exactly disappear from our tv screens, and that's especially true in later years.

Is it fair to say that Peel probably wouldn't have continued on Pops beyond the end of 1988 anyway?

Janice left in August '88, and I doubt that Peel would have fancied continuing without her. And in any case, it's not unlikely that Paul Ciani would have quietly shown him the door along with Bates, Powell and the other older Radio 1 DJs when he started bringing in Anthea Turner, Andy Crane et al.



As I said, we won't see Bananarama performing "Venus" in the studio due to Smitty hosting that particular episode - though we will see it as a breaker tomorrow night, and we'll see (almost) the full video the Friday after next.

Before people give out about SAW, it's worth pointing out that it wasn't *their* idea to do a dance version of a Shocking Blue song from 1969...

Yes as Pete Waterman himself pointed out in the Story of 1986 they thought it was an awful idea and tried to disuade them.

Peel did return for a one off episode in 1995, though that was largely a front to get Michael Aspel to suprise him with the big red book!

That's a great clip, really illustrates that he was happy to play anything at all if he liked it. You could certainly say that he was probably at his happiest on Pops in 1982, there's that episode in November which features Wham plus Blacmange, Tears For Fears and The Human League, and he says at the start that he thinks it's a brilliant line-up. Circa 1986 there was less of a Peel influence in the charts - although by the mid-nineties he was a major influence again, so it wasn't terminal - but there's still lots on these shows that he enjoyed, I'm sure.



Probably, although you could argue it was a surprise he stayed on the show after the end of 1984 when the number of presenters slimmed down dramatically and the likes of Savile, Travis and Vance all made their final appearances. So he survived that and got another two years on the show, plus he was still trusted with the big occasions like Christmas 85 and the live shows.



Yes, Ric Blaxill invited him on and he thought it might be good fun, but he said he found the recording a bit of a trial because the technology had moved on quite a bit since his last appearance, and he was particularly unnerved by the need to start a link before the camera arrived, at which point it would fly in and then fly straight off again, he said it felt like he was shouting at his kids to tidy their bedrooms. And obviously when Asp surprised him, he said "I was actually quite looking forward to going home!".

John said that the one thing he instantly realised he had to do was hang on a bit before he reacted to the book, because in the back of his mind he was thinking that Asp would say "Sorry John, not this time. Bjork, this is your life!"

Been reading about how there were issues with the picture and sound during the Amazulu performance on Thursday's episode. I'm not going to be home until Sunday to be able to see for myself to try and make a judegemtn on what went wrong. Anyone have any idea what happened? By the sounds of it they spliced that performance in from another source (possibly a YouTube download), maybe because of damage to that part of the tape?

It's a shame BBC4 stopped their TOTP tweetalongs earlier this year, they used to mention anf explain issues like this, including the times they'd had to dub the audio from off-air recordings onto mute link copies.

This particular performance, as well as the link into and the start of the Sam Fox track on Friday's edition, both had a film-effect look to them - cf. Eastenders on Drama.

I'm certain when TOTP2 have shown the Amazulu clip, there's been no issues with either picture or sound.

In terms of the visual side, I thought it may have been an alternative to reducing the brightness and contrast to counter flashing light/strobing effects. Would this be plausible?

I have noticed reduced brightness applied to TOTP clips, both on the 80s repeats and from 90s clips on TOTP2, with flashing light setups that were obviously considered acceptable in the 80s/90s but not now.

I've also seen it applied to a scene during Brooklyn Nine-Nine on E4 that contained flash photography, evidently we have different standards to the US.

The US have standards?