Quality | 2009.11.04
Bring back Top of the Pops | Lynsey Hanley
Spare us the meritocratic myths of X-Factor. We need to recapture the old spirit of Top of the Pops embodied
There\'s one thing the BBC can do to win back a nation\'s shattered trust, and that\'s to bring back Top of the Pops. No auditions, no criticism, no profiteering from the hopeful efforts of the tone-deaf. Just lights, camera, action, pop. The X Factor and its ilk, which sell the myth of meritocracy in pretty much the same way that Norman Tebbit sold the myth of job-hunting by bicycle, need some competition.
By comparison, Top of the Pops was democracy in action. No act on TOTP was ever scrutinised with anything more than the arch of John Peel \'s eyebrow, disapproving or otherwise, unless he felt particularly moved to comment. Peel was the sort of presenter who felt free to introduce Big Country as "the band who put the tree back into country". Spontaneous irreverence of this sort tends not to come from Fearne Cotton , its most recent host and arguably the final nail of inanity in its once exalted coffin.
There are few more obvious signs to be found of the revolution in opportunities for working-class people born between 1945 and 1970 than in the backgrounds of pop stars of the period. The only member of the Smiths who didn\'t go to grammar school was Morrissey and the only member of the Beatles not to was Ringo. Joy Division, from Salford and Macclesfield, were all scholarship boys, as was Sting (whose dad was a milkman). Brian Eno, son of a postie, went to art school, as did the rest of Roxy Music.
That\'s not to endorse a return to the grammar school model, tempting though it may be when presented with such a list of culture-transforming talents. TOTP at its best performed the same horizon-widening role. Numerous artists, from the dancer Michael Clark to Ian McCulloch and Neil Tennant, are quoted as saying that watching David Bowie singing Starman on Top of the Pops in April 1972, when he flung his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson, changed their lives.
Pop is in danger of becoming another of the closed-shop professions that anyone without the breeding or the nous finds it impossible to enter. The charts are strewn with posh pop stars who could, frankly, have found gainful employment at the higher end of the civil service. What do Florence and the Machine , La Roux, Will Young, and Lily Allen have in common? A private education, of course, which affords them the galloping confidence and social network required to make their way in whichever field they choose to excel in.
Then there are the state-educated artists – Amy Winehouse, Adele, Katie Melua, the Noisettes – who learned the same tricks at the specialist Brit School in Croydon. The result of such fame-farming is that you end up with the Kooks when what we really need for inspiration are actual kooks. The one bucket-educated, self-made current star who has managed to steer his way through pop\'s Krypton Factor course completely on his own terms, without contacts, industry polish or the aid of reality television, is Dizzee Rascal .
How can pop stars any longer be at once the great inspirers and the great transformers when, thanks to stage schools and Simon Cowell, they\'re subject to a weekly time-and-motion study worthy of the Model-T Ford? Most of the Top 40 is guff at the moment to anyone over the age of 15, and no, it wasn\'t always thus: my parents used to get at least as excited as I did about the weekly countdown of 20 years ago. It needs the boot up the backside that only collective action can give: namely, a generation of kids turning the TV off at 7.59 every Thursday evening, calling their best friends, and saying, "We can do better than that!"
Should TOTP return at a time when downloading extends the shelf-life of popular tracks by weeks and often months, there would have to be an injunction to prevent the Kings of Leon appearing every week of the 59 they\'ve so far spent in the Top 40 with the unerotic penile paean Sex on Fire. (Perhaps a ban on all songs with the word "sex" in them, which would have the added benefit of immediately raising quality control, while allowing Paolo Nutini through the net to sing about his Pencil Full of Lead.)
So in kindness to Mark Thompson, let\'s give him something else to think about other than the wisdom of giving fascists a platform. How\'s about: the return of TOTP every week, presented by BBC DJs from all its music stations, at 7.30pm every Thursday. Drop an episode – preferably all five – of EastEnders to make room; it won\'t kill you or "the brand". Resurrect the best showcase for British music talent we\'ve ever had and see what it does for morale.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/28/top-of-the-pops
