First viewed : 17 September 1994
By this point in time, I'd pretty much fallen out of love with Top of the Pops, partly due to the conveyor belt of amateur-ish presenters, the "exclusive" showings of superstar videos and of course the pretty dire state of the charts, so when they announced a sister programme on BBC2 on a Saturday evening I wasn't very interested.
But as luck would have it, I was down in Hatfield for a big pop quiz event the weekend it was first broadcast and my room-mate put it on. The first item I saw was one of my favourite records , Talk Talk's Today so I was on board from that point.
Initially the programme was highly structured with a few "highlights" from that week's Top of the Pops, a few performances from that date in the past ( hence Talk Talk's appearance ), an interesting video that wasn't likely to chart and a few tips for next week's chart. Johnny Walker, always one of my favourite DJs , was the unseen narrator.
Walker unfortunately left in 1997 and was replaced by Steve Wright, a constant annoyance with his biased and unfunny comments, usually about the way performers were dressed. Does anyone remember him ever winning a Best Dressed Man award ? Thought not. The show moved to a midweek slot and the structure was scrapped in favour of a fairly random selection of archive clips. For some reason, it always seem to end with a country item for Wright to slather over. The programme can take credit for "breaking" the deceased crooner Eva Cassidy this way though her dreary acoustic bleatings left me stone cold too.
The programme disappeared for a couple of years from 2004 when Top of the Pops, in its death agonies, was shunted to BBC 2 on a Sunday night and started to incorporate archive footage.
The Top of the Pops 2 brand revived when the main programme was scrapped but not long afterwards, I acquired broadband and YouTube removed any reason for continuing to tune in.
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