A tribute to Top of the Pops – the greatest pop music show ever!

Now you all know I was once something of a ligger – in fact, I could have ligged for England in my yoof! My buddies and I would ‘drop in’ on many, many showbiz parties – we’d breeze up to the bouncer and say ‘we’re on the guest list’ and depending on which band we were ligging with would depend on what happened next. For most it would be Sharon, Claire and Linda but for the Q-Tips it would be ‘Marc, Sharon and Claire’. (Don’t ask!)

Top of the Pops was THE BEST lig in the business and the only criteria there was to work for the Beeb, which Sharon did! We’d get in to the filming of the show most weeks, simply by being Shazbop’s guests (Thanks Shaz). It was simple. You just had to turn up, sit in reception at the Shepherds Bush studios and wait until the ticketed guests had all arrived then the space would be filled with employees and their guests. ‘First picks’ would go to the employees who were most flamboyant and, to be frank, that bit was a doddle for us!

So, every week we’d be there. We danced our way through shows full of our heroes and idols, as well as a few villains! I loved watching the process – I’ll never forget about a dozen takes of Haircut 100 doing ‘Love Plus One’ because Nick Hayward couldn’t get his mime right. One week we got to see the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Roman Holliday and Duran Duran all on the same evening – the Durannies were there recording ahead for the following week! I spoke to the utterly gorgeous John Taylor but failed to tell him he was a sex-god in my eyes…..what a missed opportunity! How I loved all that.

After the show, we’d head off round the labyrinthine corridors of the Beeb to the bar where we rubbed shoulders with the evening’s performers. What a thrill.

TOTP broke so many bands in the UK it wasn’t true – Madonna’s ‘Holiday’ performance in a pink wig and with two muscle-bound dancers a case in point! I wasn’t there for that one unfortunately.

DM got a bit excited last night, as we watched the ‘end of an era’ programmes on Beeb 2 when he realised I’d actually spoken to his hero (whose biography he’s now reading), John Peel on the show one night, along with Kid Jensen. I’d never told him the story before. It was only a two-minute conversation about how a Peel Session with Roman Holliday had broken ‘our boys’ but DM loved the fact that I’d spoken to the man who was there when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot!

You know my views on whose fault the demise of record sales is – if you’ve not seen me ranting about it before, then FYI it’s the record industry themselves – they took the fun out of buying a single when they stopped allowing the freebies and turned the process into a simple transaction of cash for a bit of plastic with no frills. The bland packaging of most CDs has made the problem even worse. I can completely sympathise with the view that you may as well download it from the internet in those circumstances…..but you’ll NEVER get me to agree that a download can replace a box with some postcards of my idol and the single nestling in there too or a shrink-wrapped tee-shirt with a single or whatever else we used to get! I just don’t get the view that it was exploitation – we loved it and they got a record racing up the charts…..everyone was happy in my view but there you go.

With the demise of record sales came the failure of the basic TOTP principle that you went on TOTP as your record was going up the charts and that helped boost sales. These days singles sales are so low that any single worth its salts goes straight in at no 1 so that meant TOTP had to relax the rules and from there on in it was doomed to failure. Oh and sticking it on on a Friday night when any self-respecting teenager is out trying to lose their virginity…..then moving it to Sunday, well, I ask you – by the time the charts are a week old and the new one is coming along then the whole impetus is lost.

Some of my most treasured memories are TOTP ones – RIP TOTP – it was so much fun to ‘dress wonderfully’ and ‘participate actively’!

For the third day in a row, I'm rather pleased with my shot tonight - I really 'made' this photo in as much as I had the TOTP ticket in a frame and to get the star lights reflections in the glass took a lot of doing - furniture was moved and everything! It took me 17 shots to get exactly the image I was looking for.....

Last year, I wasn't yet ready to let on that we were 'on the move' but I was preparing frantically!