In moving to a Sunday slot on BBC2, 'TOTP' is compounding its 'Antiques Roadshow' image. No loss in its current state, writes Brian Boyd.
An alien with luminous coloured hair, wearing a Boots chemist warehouse amount of make-up, dressed in a multi-coloured figure-hugging jumpsuit and playing a blue guitar is half smiling, half-smirking at the watching TV millions as he sings: "Some cat was layin' down some rock 'n' roll lotta soul, he said/Then the loud sound did seem to fade, came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase/That weren't no DJ that was hazy cosmic jive . . ." Good God. And beside him are others: some wearing satin, some with long silver hair and all of them with glitter.
This momentous hazy cosmic jive was David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars performing Starman on Top of the Pops (TOTP). Everything changed. Hundreds of rock bands were formed on July 6th, 1972, as a result. Even today's executive producer of Top of the Pops, Chris Cowey, remembers the performance, saying: "You just thought 'Wow' - that was a life-changing moment".
There were to be others: the short, sharp, shock of the first Sex Pistols performance; Kurt Cobain singing "Load up on drugs, kill your friends" at 7.30 p.m.; The Smiths debuting This Charming Man; and the time when Dexy's Midnight Runners performed Jackie Wilson Said - instead of hanging an enormous photo of the soul legend Jackie Wilson behind the band, the producers hung a huge photo of the darts player Jocky Wilson instead.
But for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction: think St Winifred's School Choir warbling about their grandma; Foster and Allen in leprechaun suits (as Ireland wept); Mr Blobby; that axis of musical evil, Waddle and Hoddle, and Queen being at number one for what seemed like eight years with the dire pomposity of Bohemian Rhapsody.
In the world of TOTP, grown men working as presenters were called "Kid" and "Diddy"; the Lycra-loving Pan's People dancers functioned as an Irish Playboy magazine; Gary Glitter always wore a surprised look (well before he had a legal reason to) and despite the waxing and waning of glam, punk, hair metal, synth pop, grunge, indie and dance there would always be Cliff - complete with rictus smile and sanctimonious ballad.
Forty years on and TOTP is an antique roadshow in terms of modern music television. Little surprise, then, that this week the BBC announced the programme would be moving to BBC2 early next year and merging with its offshoot show, TOTP2 (which plays "classic" moments from the show's history). "It's an exciting new era for TOTP," squeaked a BBC spokesperson, perhaps without a full grasp of what the viewing figures are for BBC2 on a Sunday.
OVER THE LAST 18 months TOTP has become increasingly demented - it's tried everything: a glitzy "relaunch", new presenters and "Mad!" ideas such as presenting the show live from a square in Newcastle, getting Eminem to perform on London's Tower Bridge and U2 to play in the BBC car-park.
From a high of 15 million viewers during its 1970s heyday, the show now pulls in only three million every Friday evening and the BBC1 has lost so much faith in the programme that in the schedule it is pitted against ITV's revitalised Coronation Street.
The idea behind the new BBC2 show is to mix new music with archive footage, thus attempting to broaden its viewer range and, presumably, to get some people under 40 to watch BBC2.
There are many reasons behind the show's substantial downgrading but chief among them is its traditional reliance - as signalled by its name - on the weekly singles chart. This is announced every Sunday but TOTP doesn't broadcast until the following Friday and that's too big a distance in a digital/Internet world.
And the very status of the single itself is under threat, partly due to the amount of over-priced rubbish being released but mainly because the iPod/iTunes generation can access music more quickly and cheaply. Last year alone, singles sales were down by 30 per cent on the previous year and a new low was reached just last month when the Swedish DJ Eric Prydz's Call On Me song reached number one with the lowest number of sales recorded - 23,519 copies.
THE MUSIC INDUSTRY has now irrevocably split into two very different markets: the teeny-bop single-buying market - that sends Pop Idol types, novelty tunes and inane dance-pop into the charts - and the more mature, album-buying market that sends Norah Jones and Coldplay to the top of the album charts.
Very few acts today can straddle both singles and albums charts (the Scissor Sisters being the most notable exception) and increasingly TOTP has found itself catering to the fickle, quick turnaround singles market where acts can debut at number one and then drop off the chart completely the following week. And music is so much more fragmented now: The Darkness and The Streets simply don't have the pan-generational appeal (or even tolerance level) that bands such as TOTP staples Slade enjoyed.
For a significant part of its 40-year history, TOTP was the only popular music outlet. Now, on Sky Digital, you can access any one of 65 different music channels, ranging from the specialist to the catch-all. And ITV, long jealous of TOTP's preminent status, after many failed attempts over the years, managed to steal its format, tart it up a bit and now has the most watched terrestrial popular music show in its Saturday morning offering CD:UK.
The sheer ubiquity of music now means you've as good a chance of seeing Goldie Lookin' Chain on a chat show as you do on TOTP. Even Parkinson is arguably more cutting-edge than TOTP in its championing of new, undiscovered acts (however anodyne) as compared to the current roll-call of reality TV dunderheads that is TOTP.
In its new format, the show will concentrate as much on the album charts as the singles - trying to scoop up both the Girls Aloud and the Radiohead camps. But you can't help feeling that short of changing its name to Later and having it presented by Jools Holland, it's doomed to failure. People no longer sing about "hazy cosmic jives". Unfortunately.