An Irishwoman's Diary

LAST WEEK came the happily esoteric news that BBC 4 is going to start re-running old episodes from Top of the Pops,starting with 1976. It will run them in the original time-slot, at 7.30pm, from this Thursday. The show first started airing in 1964, but as was common at the time, the BBC taped over most of the early shows, so we won't be seeing anything pre-1976.

When I heard the news, memories of six years of Thursday nights came barrelling back. I attended a boarding school, and the opportunities to watch television were minimal, due to our schedule. The weekday schedule went like this: classes 9am-4pm, with supervised study periods in the assembly hall from 5 to 7pm and again from 8 to 9pm. Lights out at 10pm.

Television viewing time was after dinner, in what remained of the hour between 7 and 8pm. The only times outside this I recall being allowed to watch television was the annual Eurovision, and once for the episode of Dallaswhen we were supposed to find out who had shot JR.

Thus every Thursday night, 100-plus girls wolfed down dinner, and raced back to the assembly hall to get a space somewhere before the theme tune started up. There was one small black and white television in a corner of the hall. Sometimes, we had to fiddle with makeshift aerials of coathangers to get a better reception. In summer, we had to first run around the hall putting up the wooden blackouts for the many windows.

With one small television and many viewers, there was a strict hierarchy of who got to sit where. The youngest sat on the floor. Then there were a few rows of chairs. Behind those, girls sat on desks, pulled from the study rows in the hall. And behind those again, the brave and foolhardy enjoyed the special Heath Robinson-type arrangement, whereby two desks were joined together, and a chair placed on top, where you sat enthroned like a kind of unsteady queen. The particularly daring stacked three chairs – any more and the chairs tilted forwards of their own volition, a fact we discovered by experimentation.

The chairs-atop-table was the best vantage point, but also the most unpredictable. People could, and did, fall off the chairs, usually when the desks moved apart when jostled. This was my favourite place to sit, perhaps because it was expressly forbidden by the nuns who deduced correctly the potential for accidents.

For 30 minutes each week, we were transported to an English studio, and glimpses of lives utterly unlike our own. We always started by rating the presenters – particularly the males – for their attractiveness and their clothes. A friend of mine crooned for joy every time Peter Powell was on the show, and wondered aloud each week for years if he might come to our debs with her, should she write and ask him.

I must have watched hundreds of episodes of Top of the Popsthrough the late 1970s and early 1980s. They all come back in a rolling blur of shiny Lycra, bad big hair, and a perpetually shrieking audience bouncing up and down. I recall Adam Ant with his weird white noseband like a racehorse; Boy George's Karma Kameleon; Soft Cell singing about Tainted Love; YMCA and Village People; Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive– a song that became my exam mantra; Ultravox's moody Vienna; and the horror one Christmas that was St Winifred's School Choir warbling There's No One Quite Like Grandma.

For some reason, I recall Legs and Co’s routines being entirely prone, waving legs in the air, but they can’t all have been. That was our least favourite part of the show, and the one we talked straight through, although we kept up a general running commentary from start to finish. Even though we turned the dial to the loudest volume on the television, we often couldn’t hear properly over our own din.

In my sixth and final year, our class had its own common room and television, and we watched the show there. It was definitely more comfortable and we no longer fell off chairs balanced on tables, but in truth, it was a much duller experience without that communal background running commentary; a continuous aural ticker tape of sarcasm, swooning, and forensic analysis of the merits or not of each song and routine.

Once I left school, I never watched the show again. It belonged to another life, and another way of life. But I might watch a couple of the reruns when they start airing. I might even put a chair up on a table for the maximum déjà vu experience.