It’s Top Of The Flops!

IT'S TOP OF THE FLOPS!

AFTER years of fighting a terminal illness, the longest-running music show on television is (at last) to be put out of its - and our - misery. 

Despite recent attempts to shed its old-fashioned image, Auntie Beeb has decided to pull the plug on Top Of The Pops next year - and about time too! 

Incredibly low ratings were partly blamed on its frightful new presenters. They always were frightful - yet even in Tony Blackburn’s day the show managed to attract 15 million viewers without fancy videos and snazzy titles.

 

 

The once-iconic show was doomed from the day pop turned to pap and rock was replaced by rap (with a capital ‘C’), when real drum kits were thrown out of the window and new bands lasted about as long as their own initials.

I tuned in recently in the vain hope of hearing music with melody and intelligible lyrics. All I saw was the recycling of old hits by talentless wannabes - murdered behind a monotonous dance beat by some dipsticks with dodgy haircuts.

  

OK, it’s now in super stereo but garbage in stereo is still garbage - and it spoke volumes last summer when a mediocre film theme with some semblance of a ‘tune’ topped the charts for four months! 

The last straw came this week when the Beeb banned a very funny and satirical Genesis video, which rightly mocked money-grabbing TV evangelists in America. As if that nice man Phil Collins could upset anybody…

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PRICE TO PAY FOR LIVE SPORT

I’M KNOWN for hating any sport that doesn’t feature a round leather ball, but the appeal of watching motor racing “live” on television truly baffles me. 

Tomorrow all roads around Silverstone will be clogged by drivers queuing up for the latest Grand Prix. Then 100,000 punters will pay £40 each to see (or not) cars whizz past at 200mph, leaving them deaf for three days. 

Perhaps they prefer it to the constant whine of Murray Walker...?

 

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CHOCCIE SHOCKER!

The Bounty bar TV commercial has pipped the Gold Blend saga in a major new survey to find the advert with “the most blatant use of sex.” 

Third place in the saucy stakes came the Cadbury’s Flake ad, where an attractive girl slowly eats a flake in the bath. How is she supposed to eat it - like a corn on the cob?   

(This column was originally published in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph on Saturday, 11 July,1992.