Harry's Blog

The final Top of the Pops was painful viewing last night. It was clear by the poor production that the BBC didn't really want to celebrate the show in its final hour, instead it was allowed to die in a pool of its own fluids looking like something that should have been put out of its misery years ago.

It wasn't all bad. Bringing back old presenters was a good idea, their confidence in front of the camera stood in stark contrast to the shy, bland and unprofessional presenters the show has been using for the last few years.

Yet the content of the show itself was pretty poor. You only had to look at the various decade roundups to wonder if the production team knew anything about music at all. The sixties selection, for example, was bizarre in the extreme and was more interesting for the bands that weren't in there than the bands that were.

The bands that weren't featured on last night's show demonstrate the failure of Top of the Pops, a problem it has always struggled with. If your only window on the world of pop music has been this show the musical world and the bands that were most successful look entirely different from reality.

The world of Top of the Pops is a world where the bands that dominated the early 1970s were Slade, Mud and Showaddywaddy. Of course, out in the real world it was Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd that were dominating the music scene.

I do have some fond memories of Top of the Pops, mostly connected to my childhood when I would dance along to many of the songs with my mum. And of course there would be the great moments of hilarity when things would go wrong - as they did when All About Eve (one of my favourite bands) failed to mime to their playback of Mather's Harbour.

However Top of the Pops has always seemed like a show created by people who know nothing about music. Directors would routinely point the cameras at the wrong band member during a solo or we'd have to suffer a lip synched performance by a band that could have performed live. Iron Maiden insisted on their first appearance that they played live, but in the traditions of TotP were made to play rather quietly, hardly rock and roll.

It comes as no surprise then to find that a new survey finds that Jools Holland's Later has been voted the best music show. It's a show where real talent is shown off as bands perform their songs live. Rather than lip sync to a crowd of brain dead kids who will scream with joy at anything.

I would have thought the final Top of the Pops would have been full of big bands that wanted to be part of the last show. But there were no new performances on yesterday's programme at all. It was like watching a funeral where no-one turned up.

Goodbye Top of the Pops, please don't come back.