Chart entered : 4 July 1981
Having spent nearly two weeks away from the TV in the Lake District , I came back to find this starting on the first Saturday back , shortly after John McEnroe ended the Borg-era at Wimbledon.
Pop Quiz was the brainchild of its presenter, Radio One's know-it-all DJ Mike Read whose star was very much in the ascendant. To be fair to him he certainly was an expert on pop history although inevitably he made the odd mistake. I remember Duran's John Taylor being asked what Roxy's last hit was and correctly answering Take A Chance when Read was looking for Avalon. Read was also very well connected and it was a huge surprise to see major rock stars who wouldn't dream of doing Top of the Pops appearing on the show, none more so than David Gilmour. At the time I thought Pink Floyd were faceless untouchables so it was a revelation to see that at least one of them was an normal-looking amiable bloke.
The show wasn't out to humiliate anyone so the individual questions did normally fall within the artist's own genre or time period. Nevertheless some of those appearing did get horribly exposed such as ex-Selecter frontwoman Pauline Black or Lynsey De Paul who clearly hadn't turned the radio on for years and just sat there gawping helplessly at Read.
In the 1984 season Morrissey turned up and did fine alongside his incongruous team-mates ( see above ). Interestingly, they were up against the bassists' union of Nick Beggs, Phil Lynott and Derek Forbes. That season ended with a special episode pitching arch-rivals Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran against each other. Smash Hits rather pooped the party by inadvertently printing a photo showing the final score - a convincing victory for the Brummie boys - before the show was broadcast. After that the programme was put on ice but not before Read had made a small fortune from a board game version.
Ten years later it was revived in the same time slot and with much the same format but the world had changed. Read had been allowed to do a one -off special to mark the 30th anniversary of Top of the Pops at the start of the year but he had long since fallen from grace and become a bit of a joke so the new host was former Tiswas presenter and top London DJ, Chris Tarrant. His irreverent approach was a change from Read's ingratiation and was a plus but the format ignored the fact that the mass audience for pop of the early eighties had splintered into numerous sub-genres with militant disinterest in each other. The contestants were being asked to identify snatches of lyric from hits that had the lifespan of a cheap firework..
For example, The Wonder Stuff's Miles Hunt got a couple of lines referencing Sylvia Plath and Harold Pinter from Manic Street Preachers' Faster , a ferociously uncommercial single that spent a single week in the Top 30 at number 16. Totally baffled, he said "I've no idea but it sounds like the sort of drivel Morrissey would come out with". When Tarrant told him it was the Manics he retorted , "Well I said it was drivel !"
The other episode I recall from the Tarrant revival was the one where St Etienne's Sarah Cracknell appeared in a very revealing pink dress ( unfortunately I couldn't find a still for that one ) and team-mate Tony Hadley addressed all his answers to her cleavage.
It was axed again after one season.
Read finally got the chance to revive it in 2008 on the little-known Red TV channel, best known for ( if anything ) repeats of Crown Court . He was doing it in conjunction with a guy called Jon Kutner who works on the Network Chart. Jon's also an enthusiastic pop quizzer and I'd got to know him over the years. There was no budget for star contestants so they had to make do with members of the public instead and Jon asked me and a number of other stalwarts to make up the numbers.
So I drove down to Birmingham to a studio in an industrial estate unit that was little bigger than a lock-up garage. We milled around downstairs for a while at the end of an office with a few girls working onscreen. None of them looked up when Mike Read arrived but he stayed in good spirits saying "It may only be Swindon v Mansfield but at least we're on the pitch". Then the director came downstairs, a fat arrogant Asian guy and shouted "Right- who's the host ?" Read took that one on the chin as well.
We went upstairs and I met my team-mates , a brother and sister duo from London that I'd never seen before in my life ,but for the purposes of the programme , I had to pretend I was part of their pub quiz team. We were up against a general knowledge trio who'd recently
appeared on Eggheads and had clearly caught the TV bug. We absolutely caned them and it was almost pitiful watching them deflate as they gradually realised how far out of their depth they'd wandered. Afterwards one of them came up to me and said "You know far too much !" The only blot on the experience was that we were using a buzzer system that Jon had borrowed from my friends Ray Marshall and Steve Burdin. I was very familiar with it but Mike Read wasn't and he kept forgetting that he had to re-set it after each question. As I was answering most of the questions in the quickfire round at the end, I kept pressing my buzzer and not getting any sound so I started saying "beep beep" to attract his attention in the expectation it would be overdubbed with a buzzer noise in the editing suite. That was optimistic; it went out exactly as it happened which made me look a bit of a div.
The show didn't catch fire and Read was declared bankrupt not too long after that. He got another go at it in 2011 ( I don't know if Jon Kutner was involved or not ) on Vintage TV but it only lasted for three weeks.
The fickle finger of fame, eh? I was once asked (along with the rest of the band I was in at the time) to take part in a dating show. Wisely, we turned it down (we all had girlfriends at the time, for one thing).
ReplyDeleteI had the ZX Spectrum version of "Pop Quiz", I don't know if Reed got royalties. I hope not, as it was crap!