There was Ready, Steady, Go!, then there was Top of the Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test. But what about all those lesser-known shows that have chronicled rock and pop over the years? Jeff Evans, author of Rock & Pop on British TV, takes another look. 

Talk to DJ and presenter Bob Harris, and he’ll tell you that there is a solid backbone to the history of rock and pop music on British television.

“There's a timeline of great TV programmes,” he says, thinking back first of all to the days when he was a young rock'n'roll fan, starved of television coverage of his favourite music. “I remember when Six-Five Special first started and I thought how great it was that we’ve got some kind of dedicated programme. Then suddenly Oh Boy! [arrived]. It captured the excitement of rock'n'roll in the most amazing way. Then in the 60s, Ready, Steady, Go! 'The weekend starts here'. Ready, Steady, Go!, for me, is just about the best music show I've ever seen on TV. Then Whistle Test and now Later. That's the lineage.”

Bob sums up very succinctly the direction of travel that pop music on television has taken, and pinpoints the shows that have really driven the genre. He could have added, of course, the evergreen Top of the Pops to complete the line-up, and more that have already been comprehensively covered in an earlier blog, but then there are so many, less obvious great music shows that scarcely get a mention these days. Perhaps it’s time to pay them the respect they deserve as we glance back over the history of music on TV.

To do this, we need to start before the dawn of the rock'n'roll era. Hit Parade, which emerged in 1952, was based on a US format and was the first purposeful attempt by the BBC to bring life to televised music. Up to this point, dance band shows added little visually to what could be heard on radio, so Hit Parade introduced a resident troupe of dancers and singers to put together little vignettes to tell the story of each song in a more dynamic way. But what is important, historically, about Hit Parade is that it featured a popularity chart. This was compiled from sheet music and record sales, along with radio requests, and predated the first published record chart in the UK by 10 months. With its chart countdown, Hit Parade set the pattern for Top of the Pops and other shows in decades to follow.

Not Six-Five Special...

Later in the decade, programmes like Six-Five Special and Oh Boy! were the first to embrace the excitement of rock'n'roll, and then the family-orientated Juke Box Jury cornered the market in reviews of new releases. A number of similar formats followed on ITV. The popular Thank Your Lucky Stars had a “Spin a Disc” segment, in which Birmingham teenager Janice Nicholls sprang to fame by declaring "I’ll give it five" in a strong Birmingham to show her approval for various discs, and the London weekday ITV franchisee Associated-Rediffusion created Needle Match, a contest between the latest releases from the UK and the US. Arguing the case for British releases was a young Oliver Reed, while David Frost was the production assistant charged with collating the jury’s votes.

Ready, Steady, Go! may be the 60s show that people most fondly remember, but it was predated (some would say inspired) by Discs A Gogo, a programme created by Television Wales and the West (TWW), a tiny ITV provider. Discs A Gogo began in 1961 and ran for five years, right in the midst of the British beat boom. It took as its premise a cellar coffee bar (Gogo’s), where kids mingled around artists introduced by DJ Kent Walton. It wasn’t shown across all the UK but that did not deter all the big acts, from the Beatles down, from heading to Bristol for the weekly recordings.

With programmes like Discs A Gogo, ITV was leading the way in coverage of pop music and it took the BBC a while to catch up. Juke Box Jury apart, pop music on the BBC was confined largely to children’s TV shows. The Lenny the Lion Show that began in 1957 had always enjoyed some musical content but this was pushed to the fore in 1962 when the show became Pops and Lenny. Similarly, Crackerjack always aligned itself with what was going on in the record charts, not just featuring many of the latest hit bands and singers – anyone from Tom Jones to the Who – but also by creating a medley of chart songs to finish off each show, with humorous new lyrics added for good measure.

Not Top Of The Pops...

The arrival of Top Of The Pops in 1964 swung the balance back in the BBC’s favour, and the corporation built on this with a series of other shows that began to feature pop culture as a whole, beginning with the magazine show A Whole Scene Going in 1966 and continuing through the early-evening arts programme How It Is in 1968. The latter was produced and presented by Tony Palmer whose seminal Omnibus film All My Loving, shown in the same year, contained highly disturbing newsreel scenes of graphic violence, it illustrated how political the music world had become, and revealed how pop artists had found a powerful, influential voice.

This intellectualisation of pop and the recognition that it could now be discussed in the same terms as classical music or even fine art encouraged the BBC to introduce new BBC2 shows that were spun off the arts review Late Night Line-Up. These began with Colour Me Pop in 1968 and continued with Disco 2 in 1970, both titles somewhat misleading as to the programme contents as they both focused on album music rather than the singles chart. The progression then continued into The Old Grey Whistle Test, which became a bulwark of rock on TV for 16 years.

On the pure pop front, Top of the Pops had seen off Ready, Steady, Go! and ITV needed to find a competitor chart show. The only problem was that the commercial channel had rarely looked beyond children’s television as a means of doing this. Granada drove the issue forward, with Muriel Young – formerly host of the kids’ series Five O’Clock Club – producing a long run of teenybop shows that included Lift Off with Ayshea and Get It Together, fronted by former Basil Brush straightman Roy North. There were also programmes featuring the Bay City Rollers, Arrows, Marc Bolan and Paul Nicholas.

LWT also chipped in with Mike Mansfield’s Supersonic but none of these shows troubled the hegemony of Top of the Pops and consequently didn’t encourage the BBC to do much more with music. With The Old Grey Whistle Test taking care of the album audience and Top of the Pops handling the singles chart, everything was sewn up, leaving room for just a few showcases for performers with broad appeal such as Cilla Black and Leo Sayer.

The punk movement derailed television pop during the mid-70s. Top of the Pops, despite baulking at the Sex Pistols early on, soon embraced the new music but Whistle Test took a while to get on board, for the simple reason that punk was a singles-based phenomenon and until punk bands produced albums they couldn’t appear on the show.

Not Whistle Test...

Over on ITV, future Factory Records founder Tony Wilson turned his music show So It Goes into a weekly punk/new wave fest. This was followed soon after by a show called Revolver, which was set in a fictional fading dancehall that had reluctantly decided to present live bands in order to survive. Resentment rained down on the pogoing audience from the hall’s “manager", comedian Peter Cook, who snootily addressed the mob via a video link from his office.

As the 80s arrived, the BBC was working hard to bring music to young people in a more down-to-earth way through pop magazines such as Oxford Road Show and Riverside. The intellectual slant continued through Eight Days a Week, which brought together musicians, journalists, video producers and the like, to discuss new releases, gigs, films and music books. This was also the decade that saw the start of The Rock'n'Roll Years, which chronicled the events of the years 1956 onwards by cleverly overlaying news footage with the hits of the day.

The Old Grey Whistle Test moved with the times and trimmed its name to Whistle Test, but it struggled to maintain its relevance because of the whirlwind that was The Tube, Tyne Tees’ chaotic but electric version of Ready, Steady, Go! for the 80s. Broadcast live on a Friday night, The Tube had its share of disasters but it delivered a real buzz for anyone into music in this era.

Eventually, Whistle Test conceded defeat, a move hastened by the arrival of Janet Street-Porter who needed the budget for her youth television plans, based around the DEF II strand.

DEF II had a strong musical bent, with offerings that importantly shed light on, for instance, house, hip-hop, soul, funk and reggae. It also included the French import Rapido, a flippant show hosted by Antoine de Caunes who hammed up his Gallic accent to add to its quirkiness. More relevant to the developing indie scene was Snub TV, a show set up by two former Rough Trade records employees. Making a virtue of their lack of funding, they took the programme to the bands and filmed them on breaks during rehearsals, paring music television back to its essentials. The show gave breaks to bands like the Stone Roses, just as the “Madchester" scene was unfolding.

Not TFI Friday...

The Britpop 90s were most memorably covered on television by Channel 4’s controversial magazine The Word and the "weekend starts here" buzz of TFI Friday, although the show that many music fans rated most highly was The White Room, developed by former Tube executives Malcolm Gerrie and Chris Cowey. The idea was to strip away all the frippery that had descended onto television’s coverage of music, eschewing the special effects and the clever camera tricks to just film artists in the simplest of settings – literally a white room with no distractions. Gerrie reckons it could have become Channel 4’s Later and still be giving Jools Holland’s BBC2 show ­– which started a couple of years earlier – a run for its money today if the channel had kept it going.

In the new millennium, music on television became less mainstream and more fragmented by target audience. In most cases, it was either shown on Saturday morning for kids – via shows like The Pop Zone and CD:UK – through the night in Channel 4’s 4Music strand or lodged in one of those new-fangled digital channels. There were still some shows that managed to stand out, not least Popworld, which was devised as part of a multi-media commercial package. Its developer, Simon Fuller – former manager of the Spice Girls – conceived the idea of a Popworld website that marketed CDs, downloads, concert tickets and just about anything a young music fan could want, and the Channel 4 show was just one facet of this. The programme was far more than just an advert for the online presence, however, and its subversive presenters Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver drew a huge audience for the way in which they poked fun at the stars of the day.

The digital era and the arrival of the red button and live streaming have now changed the face of music on television for ever. The BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury, which began in 1997, exemplifies this better than anything, giving fans arguably a better – if somewhat different – experience at home, or out and about on their phones, than actually going to the festival, by offering a choice of viewing from across several stages. There is very little of what we might describe as "traditional" television music coverage available, at least on mainstream channels - Later with Jools Holland being the best example - but it’s never been easier to get your fix of music, with television no longer the only medium capable of delivering a visual take on what’s going on in the music world.

Fifty years ago, the BBC's Christmas Day was more or less fully developed into a form recognisable now, with a full range of programmes on radio and the small screen. 

1965 was the first full year where there were two BBC television channels, following the launch of BBC2 in April 1964.  The second channel was gradually becoming available in more parts of the country, though it would be a while before it reached the same level of coverage as BBC1.  But many people still had television sets working on 405 lines only, so were unable to receive the 625-line BBC2 even if they lived in an area where it was available. 

Television programmes on BBC1 began at 9.15 with Welcome Christmas, a music programme featuring singers Ivor Emmanuel (then perhaps best known for his appearance in the film Zulu) and Ursula Connors. 

At 9.45, Laurel and Hardy were seen in their 1937 film Way Out West, featuring the song The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which was to become a top ten hit in 1975.  This was the fifth showing of the film, it having been first televised in 1950. 

At 10.45 See the Children Sing was a carol concert from the Royal Festival Hall, and was followed by a Christmas Morning Service live from the village church in Fenny Compton, Warwickshire, at 11.15. 

Midday saw the regular Meet the Kids programme, this year hosted by Leslie Crowther, and relayed from St. George’s Hospital, Tooting, where Crowther and guests Tony Hart and ventriloquist Ray Alan, accompanied by Tich and Quackers, helped entertain children confined to hospital for the festive season.  The show had first been televised in 1961, when the presenter was Max Bygraves.  This was Crowther’s second stint as compere, and he would do the next two years as well. 

Champions on Ice at 12.45 featured international ice skaters including the new British ice dance champions Diane Towler and Bernard Ford.  At 1.25 The Andy Williams Show included regular guests The Osmond Brothers, long before their fame as 1970s pop stars. 

Afternoon All

Usually shown in the early evening, Dixon of Dock Green was relegated to 2.15 because of the Christmas schedule. The series had been going for 10 years at this point, and by now the only remaining characters from its first series were the lead, George Dixon, played by Jack Warner, and Peter Byrne as Detective Sergeant Andy Crawford (there were occasional appearances by George's daughter Mary, who was also Andy's wife).  This Christmas Day episode was called Georgina, written by Eric Paice.  It took place in real time and saw the avuncular Sergeant Dixon deal with a medical emergency when help is unable to reach a sick woman.  It’s notable that there is no character called Georgina in the cast list...

Several time-honoured Christmas staples followed this dramatic interlude, with the Queen’s Christmas message at 3.00, Billy Smart’s Circus directly afterwards, Disney Time at 4.00, presented by Maurice Chevalier, and at 4.50 the pantomime Mother Goose.  Terry Scott took the title role with Norman Vaughan playing ‘her’ son, and the cast included Jon Pertwee as the Squire, and right at the bottom of the list, one David Jason (his first BBC appearance, though he had previously appeared on ITV in Crossroads).  After the 6.25 News Summary, Val Doonican fronted the Christmas Day charitable  Appeal.  At the same time - 6.30 - BBC2 started its transmissions for the day, with When Comedy Was King, a compilation of early American comedy movies from the likes of Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy.

On BBC1 at 6.35 was the latest episode of Dr Who.  Now just beginning its third year, it had been decided to continue with the current story, an epic twelve-episode adventure known internally as The Daleks’ Master Plan, rather than skip a week for Christmas.  

The episode was called The Feast of Steven - a festive pun on the name of the Doctor's companion Steven, played by future Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves.  Like the current series, at this time every episode had its own title, although they were always part of a story consisting of a number of 25-minute episodes, most often four or six. Allegedly commissioned because BBC executive Huw Wheldon’s mother liked the Daleks, the original six-part story written by Dalek creator Terry Nation was extended to 12 episodes, with former story editor Dennis Spooner contributing the extra scripts from a storyline by Nation.

Since it would go out on Christmas Day (the only time this happened until 2005), it was decided that unlike the rest of this dark and disturbing story, which had already seen two sympathetic characters killed off, the instalment would not feature the Daleks, despite the fact that half the country had probably unwrapped items of Dalek merchandising that morning, as this was still the height of ‘Dalekmania’. 

The episode was split into two mini-stories, with the first set in a Liverpool police station, although the production team of Z Cars had turned down a proposal for an appearance by its cast.  The second half of the episode took place in 1920s Hollywood.  The episode was played for laughs, and was topped off by William Hartnell, as the Doctor, turning to the camera at the end and wishing “A Merry Christmas to all of you at home”.

I've arrived, and to prove it, I'm here...

Following Dr Who was Max Bygraves meets the Black and White Minstrels at 7.00.  The Minstrels' founder and choirmaster George Mitchell had been broadcasting since 1945, and had become the BBC’s go-to man for light choral singing.  His choirs made frequent radio and occasional television appearances, including a regular spot on Off the Record, an ancestor of Top of the Pops. 

The Mitchell Minstrels first appeared in Gentlemen, Be Seated!, part of the National Radio Show coverage in 1957.  The first Black and White Minstrel Show was shown on 14 June 1958, and it was soon a popular favourite with its mixture of old-style minstrel songs, show tunes and other middle-of-the-road material, gaining huge ratings by the early 60s.  The use of black-face make-up (ironically it was actually red when the show was made in monochrome, for technical reasons) was not controversial at first, as minstrel shows were a long-established tradition, but by the late 60s some protests were received and a series called Music, Music, Music was made without the make-up, but this was not as successful.

Max Bygraves was, like Mitchell, one of the rich wave of talent that emerged after the Second World War, and regularly broadcast as a singer and comedian.  He made a big impression in Educating Archie, the hit 50s comedy series based around ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews, and Bygraves made many more radio appearances in the 50s and early 60s.  He was also a successful recording artist, and had spent most of 1965 on a world tour, beginning in South Africa.  His next appearance on BBC tv after this Christmas show was on New Year’s Day 1966, together with two of his children and ‘Uncle Eric’ (Eric Sykes, one of Educating Archie's writers), as the panel of Juke Box Jury.

One notable absentee from this year’s Christmas schedule was Christmas Night with the Stars, which began in 1958. This was only the second time, the other being 1961, that it had not been broadcast.  The annual show consisted of short episodes of popular entertainment shows, usually specially made.  The programme was also missing from 1966’s schedule, but then returned every year until 1972, and was revived in 1994 as Fry and Laurie Host a Christmas Night with the Stars, and in 2003 under the original title, presented by Michael Parkinson.

The big Christmas night film at 8.00 was Road to Bali, receiving its first BBC screening, in an era where you were unlikely to see recent films on television. It was made in 1952 and starred the classic team of Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. 

Hollywood studios were becoming more willing to allow their output to appear on television, having previously been wary of the effect of the medium on cinema attendances. As it had become clear that television was here to stay, film companies protected their future by making films and series specially for television.  Nevertheless it is still noticeable how few feature films were shown at this time.

Comedy continued at 9.30 and The Ken Dodd Show, with special guest star Sandie Shaw, and John Laurie and Patricia Hayes among the cast.  The script was by Dodd and his then regular writer Eddie Braben – they parted company a few years later and Braben became the writer for Morecambe and Wise.  The main news was at 10.30, where stories covered included carol singing on President Johnson’s Texas ranch, American troops celebrating Christmas in Vietnam, and the traditional Christmas Day swim in the Serpentine.  

Surprisingly late in the day, at 10.35 (although it was repeated the next day at 12.15), was Top of the Pops ’65.  This was only the second Christmas the show had seen since its debut on 1 January 1964.  The programme was pre-recorded and featured ‘The No.1 Records of the Year’, including the Beatles, inevitably, as well as newer stars like Tom Jones, Sonny and Cher and the Rolling Stones, and was a bumper edition lasting 75 minutes.  The last programme on BBC1 was A Christmas Reverie, a talk by the popular religious broadcaster Werner Pelz, followed by the Weather and Close Down at midnight.

BBC2’s alternative television schedule, after When Comedy Was King, consisted of a News Summary at 7.55, Berlioz’s The Childhood of Christ at 8.00, the prize-winning Swedish nature film Island Yearbook at 9.35, then episode two of a three-part adaptation of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet at 10.35, with Valerie Gearon in the title role.  It was directed by former BBC children’s staff producer Rex Tucker in the BBC’s Glasgow studios, where he had been producing classic serials since leaving the Doctor Who production team in 1963, while the series was being developed. 

The evening concluded as usual with Late Night Line-Up at 11.20.  As the programme was open-ended, no closedown time was listed, but it is likely to have been around midnight.

Christmas Listening

BBC radio was still composed of the post-war Home and Light Programmes, plus the Third Network, which itself comprised the Music Programme in daytime and the Third Programme in the evening (and, depending on the day, the Sport Service or the Study Session between the two, though neither of these broadcast on Christmas Day).

Radio highlights for Christmas Day 1965 included another Ken Dodd show at 1.10 on the Home Service, followed by Desert Island Discs where the castaway was the Earl of Harewood;  an adaptation of A Christmas Carol with Ralph Richardson as Scrooge was at 2.15, and at 4.00 Spike Milligan starred in The Naughty Navy Show.  The Home Service Christmas Day ended with Richard Burton reading his own Christmas story, then at 11.02 the traditional Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, repeated from the previous day. 

Over on the Light Programme, Brian Matthew introduced the usual mixture of pop music in Saturday Club at 10.00, including Cliff Richard and the Shadows, there was a Christmas episode of the sitcom Sid and Dora with Sid James and Dora Bryan at 5.00, and composer and former head of BBC Light Entertainment Eric Maschwitz recalled Some Foolish Things at 6.00. 

Home and Away at 7.30 was a Forces Christmas show from Berlin, then Gracie Fields sang at 8.15.  The night was rounded off with Music for Your Party at 10.15, where the bill was headed by Freddie and the Dreamers. 

On the Third Network, the Music Programme had Wagner’s The Mastersingers all afternoon from 1.30,  while the Third Programme schedule had Breath of Fresh Air at 7.30, a drama of a Sussex childhood during the First World War, and a Mozart concert with Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim at 8.35.  Closedown was at 11.15, following the News.

 

I was on a suburban London railway platform the other day and thought I recognised one of the other people waiting for a train: I did, it was the actor Trevor Peacock, now best known for his appearances in The Vicar of Dibley. He has had a long career as an actor, and before that as a songwriter, and before that as a scriptwriter, for, among other things, the pioneering BBC pop show Six-Five Special.

Six-Five Special was one of the programmes brought in when the BBC ended its ‘Toddlers’ Truce’, when television closed down from around 6pm to 7pm, supposedly in order for parents to be able to put their children to bed. The ITV companies, who were obliged to have the same break by the Independent Television Authority, had objected as they were losing potential revenue, though the BBC actually saved money by not having to fill that time.

When the practice was abolished, on weekdays the BBC had the popular light current affairs series Tonight. On Saturdays it decided to present a show to appeal to the burgeoning teenage market. As it was to transmit at five past six, following the 6pm news, it was called Six-Five Special, and in line with the railway imagery the title sequence showed a steam train travelling at speed, with the signature tune performed by resident band, Don Lang and his Frantic Five. The hosts were Jo Douglas (who also co-produced) and Pete Murray.

The BBC had wanted a magazine programme that would feature topics other than music, so there were celebrity guests and a sports section presented by boxer Freddie Mills. But producer Jack Good knew that it was the music content that attracted his audience. After a year Good became disenchanted with the struggle to get his way and defected to ITV, where he started Oh Boy!. Six-Five Special carried on, but was eventually dropped when ratings struggled, in December 1958. (Quirky note, there was a special edition in the early hours of January 1st, 1958, called Twelve-Five Special, broadcast from a restaurant overlooking London Airport.)

Six-Five Special was of course not the first BBC programme that took an interest in popular music - it had been a feature of broadcasting both in sound and vision since the start of the two media. However it was perhaps the first show aimed at young people with music at the centre of its content. Other shows featured pop acts, including rock and roll – one long-running television show of the 50s was Off the Record presented by former bandleader Jack Payne, which included performances by many music acts of the time, including Buddy Holly and the Crickets, in the last episode of the show, in March 1958.

Rock and roll and other pop music was to gain another outlet in April 1959, when a new show Drumbeat was launched. This featured a regular roster of acts, including Bob Miller and the Millermen, and the John Barry Seven, as well as frequent appearances by Adam Faith, Vince Eager and other early British rock and rollers. Having made appearances in sketches in Six-Five Special as well as scripting it, Trevor Peacock became the presenter of Drumbeat after the first few episodes (the original host was Gus Goodwin). The show only lasted one series, finishing in August 1959.

In the meantime though, another much longer-running show had begun, based on a US format, the record review show Juke Box Jury. Presented by DJ David Jacobs, this ran from June 1959 until December 1967, with revivals in 1979 (with Noel Edmonds) and 1989-90 (with Jools Holland). The format was simple, a panel of four celebrities listened to newly released records and gave their opinions whether they would be a hit or a ‘miss’.

With no live performances, and only occasional personal appearances by the artists who made the records, it’s hard to understand the appeal other than the scarcity of pop music on television or radio at the time. The panel was not particularly young and trendy, though there was initially a ‘typical teenager’, one Susan Stranks, later to present the ITV children’s show Magpie. Pop artists would often be at least one of the line-up, but the majority seemed to be fairly middle-aged entertainers or ‘personalities’. There was the occasional attempt to be more relevant, as with special shows featuring groups, famously the Beatles on 7th December 1963, the same night as the BBC broadcast a concert of theirs from Liverpool. Later the Rolling Stones and one or two other bands repeated the trick (the Stones’ appearance being the only occasion where there were five panellists instead of four).

Towards the end of its initial run, DJs such as Pete Murray and Alan Freeman having been frequent guest panellists over the years, it was decided to have all-DJ panels for a while, but this too was dropped after a few months. The final edition on 27th December 1967 had Pete Murray and Susan Stranks (both of whom were in the first edition) along with Lulu and Eric Sykes.

Flagship of pop coverage

With the resurgence on interest in home grown rock and ‘beat’ music in the early 60s, the BBC decided to try its luck with a new regular programme featuring pop music, this time based on records that were making their way up the singles charts. With pop music on BBC radio still confined to a few shows on the Light Programme, this was to be a major new attraction – albeit a belated reaction to ITV shows Thank Your Lucky Stars which started in 1961, and Ready Steady Go which began in 1963.

Debuting on 1st January 1964, and initially broadcast from the BBC’s Manchester studio (a converted church in Dickenson Road), it was entitled Top of the Pops, and would become the flagship of BBC pop coverage. Lasting until 2006 in its regular format, with only Christmas specials, spin-offs like Top of the Pops 2 and archive repeats since, TOTP was a winning formula, especially in the first few decades of its existence, with live performances predominating - live in the sense of the artists being in the studio, only occasionally were they not miming to pre-recorded tracks.

For many years these were supposed to be specially recorded, but given the difficulty of replicating the carefully crafted sound of the original record, it is believed that this was not always adhered to. Over the years the amount of live performances decreased – even in the early years, acts like the Beatles (who only appeared in the TOTP studio once, to promote Paperback Writer/Rain in 1966) would be represented by film (either stock shots or specially made promos) or videotaped performances, as their schedules prevented them from making the studio recordings. In the early 70s some acts who could not turn up in person had their records ‘interpreted’ by specially made film clips. One or two acts also thought it beneath them to appear, and some records were banned by the BBC as not being suitable for a family audience.

By far the best-known replacement for artists though was having the show’s resident dance troupe perform a routine to accompany a song. The first of these was The Go-Jos, who were succeeded in 1968 by the most famous dancers, Pan’s People, choreographed by Flick Colby. In 1976 they were replaced briefly by Ruby Flipper, then within the same year by Legs & Co. The latter survived until they were phased out in autumn 1981, then in December that year the last in-house dance act, Zoo, started a run of just under two years. From October 1983 it was felt that pop videos made a dance troupe unnecessary, and the style of the whole show had moved on as well.

Concurrent with early Top of the Pops, BBC2 was not afraid to present its own take on the medium, in the form of The Beat Room, which favoured less chart-oriented fare, namely acts in the rhythm and blues genre, though it was advertised as ‘twenty-five minutes of non-stop beat and shake’, which sounds like someone cleaning a carpet. The first show featured Millie, The Animals and Lulu and the Luvvers, later episodes had Manfred Mann, The Hollies, The Kinks, Tom Jones, The Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye and many more. One early act was Davy Jones and the King Bees, whose lead singer went on to greater things once he changed his name to Bowie.

The Beat Room finished at the end of January 1965, to be succeeded immediately by Gadzooks! It’s All Happening, which had many aspects in common (as well as, additionally, a silly title – which was changed to “Gadzooks! It’s the In Crowd” after a few months. Much better…)

Over on BBC1, late 1965 brought Stramash!, a pop show made in Glasgow which included some elements of Gadzooks, but the beat boom was losing its impetus. Pop acts had long been featured on children’s programmes such as Crackerjack and occasionally Blue Peter, and this continued with acts appearing on The Basil Brush Show when it began in 1968. Also that year The Animals’ former keyboard player Alan Price presented Price to Play, an educational children’s series about the evolution of rock and roll. The following year saw Price present a more straightforward music show Monster Music Mash, including performances by Fleetwood Mac (mark 1), The Moody Blues, and Slade in their early skinhead phase.

Sole survivor

BBC2 continued to promote ‘serious’ rock music, firstly through Late Night Line-Up occasionally featuring artists like The Jimi Hendrix Experience, which developed into the spin-off programme Colour Me Pop in June 1968. As the title implies, it was in colour, and the few existing editions provide some of the earliest colour pop footage. The first edition featured Manfred Mann, with each show usually based around a single artist performing either their greatest hits, or sometimes tracks from a new album. This series lasted 18 months, and was succeeded at the start of 1970 by Disco 2, another Line-Up spin-off, presented at first by Tommy Vance, and later by Richard Williams. This had a more varied content, and started to feature commentary and reviews, as well as more adventurous types of music. When this ended in July 1971, the format was rejigged, though Williams continued to present.

The new version was named after the music industry story that new tunes would be tried out on doormen, cleaners etc, to see if they could whistle them after one hearing - this was called The Old Grey Whistle Test. After the first series Richard Williams left and was replaced by DJ Bob Harris, the best-remembered host of the programme, whose laconic style and garish tank tops defined an era – to a certain section of the population at least. Harris himself left the show as punk and new wave music began to be featured at the end of the 70s. Anne Nightingale, who had latterly been his co-host, took over, and the show survived into the late 80s under the stewardship of David Hepworth, Mark Ellen, and later Andy Kershaw – by which time the title had been curtailed to just Whistle Test.

Spin-offs from the series included Sight and Sound in Concert (which had stereo sound from Radio 1 to replace the tv sound, if you wanted) and Rock Goes to College though 'OGWT' did its own occasional special broadcasts of concerts – notably Queen, Rod Stewart and Elton John. As well as music performances, the show was known for in-depth interviews, and in the absence of actual film of bands, many early editions featured unrelated archive footage to go with album tracks. In those days, album tracks mattered…

At the end of the 70s the genre of youth programming began to emerge, and this naturally featured a lot of music. Shows like Something Else, which hailed from the BBC’s Community Programmes Unit, were succeeded by the likes of The Oxford Road Show and Riverside, which ironically were more like magazine programmes – shades of Six-Five…? At the end of the 80s came the dedicated youth strand Def II which featured shows like Behind the Beat and Dance Energy.

With the advent of dedicated music cable and satellite channels, was the death knell being sounded for a certain kind of music television? Perhaps the sole surviving serious music show is “Later… with Jools Holland” which has graced our screens since 1992, preserving something of the spirit of Whistle Test, even transmitting live as did the first Whistle Tests, and itself a spin-off from The Late Show’s music content. As for the rest, while there is now blanket coverage of music festivals, and various channels showing music videos to choose from, television coverage of pop and rock music seems dominated by talent shows, while the nostalgia market is catered for by repackaging archive material on BBC4.

I didn’t like to ask Trevor what he made of it all.

Andrew Martin will be your regular Sunday guide through the history of broadcasting by digging out archive gems and information from the BBC Genome listings.