Christmas is tradition—an itemised re-enactment of all the things we did before, as individuals, as families, as a culture. These rituals hang heavy, adding to the torpor that creeps through each household once dinner is over, when even the children have started to fizzle out, and suddenly it’s dark before four.
But Christmas is exhausting also because it is so unfamiliar—a chaotic upending of routine and restraint: drinking strange drinks at strange times of day; consuming food that’s heavy as lead, all dried fruit and liquor; filling our houses with bowls of snacks to ensure that everyone gets into a destructive rhythm of never not eating. (At Christmas we are always full, but never sated.) And so we slump onto the sofa and with what energy that remains, turn our eyes to the part of the room where there is still life, to the lucent, flickering screen.
Christmas, as much as it is about anything, is about what we watch. My staples include The Snowman (with Christmas Bowie at the start), Carols from King’s for pretty music and candlelit cloisters, and at least one ghost story (the Mark Gatiss MR James adaptations are decent, but not as good as the Ghost Story for Christmas films from the 1970s that inspired them). But in recent years there has been a gap in my mental schedule for a programme that more than any, conjures the spirit of Christmas as I know it—a secular, late 20th-century Christmas—which is Top of the Pops (TOTP).
The programme ended in 2006 but annual festive specials continued until 2021. We still have an annual TOTP2 compilation of all the perennial Christmas songs you know and just about tolerate—the Pogues, Wham, Mariah etc—and a TOTP “review of the year”, but the programme has a more authentic afterlife in the repeats and compilations shown on BBC Four on Friday nights. Archive footage of live broadcasts is the closest thing we are ever likely to have to a time machine. The intact episodes give a deep sense of the period in which they were made, folk memory preserved in tape reel, connecting us to Britains that existed before we were born.
The festive specials worked because in its heyday TOTP was intensely Christmassy even when it wasn’t Christmas. Through the 1970s until the early 1980s the studio background was a deep black, the better to offset all the bright greens and soft pinks and yellows of the stage and studio lights: which is to say it had the colour scheme of a suburban street in December. The soft-focus camera filters, the heavy make-up of the performers and the gentle sonic fug of analogue recordings all add to the sense of creating light and comfort to set against the darkest time of the year.
And it is the inescapable festive records of the 1970s by Slade and Wizzard, as overfamiliar and annoying as they are, that sound to me closest to what a British Christmas is. There is a sense that all that analogue warmth and frantic good cheer isn’t just showbiz opportunism, but born of a genuine need to distract from the great darkness outside. The glam rock bands were themselves an odd confluence of light and dark—men like Slade’s Dave “superyob” Hill and Noddy Holder were intensely blokey-looking blokes with lathe-operator forearms and abattoir-worker sideburns, yet dressed in garish, outlandish clothes, make-up, glitter, even tassels. Roy Wood of Wizzard looked like an ancient pagan god who had been dragged out of the forest and blasted with a glitter gun.
The counterpoint of light and dark was intrinsic to TOTP. First airing in 1964, and produced by the BBC’s Light Entertainment department, the programme reflected better than anything else all the chaos and fecundity of popular music from the Sixties to the end of the century. Dictated as it was by the mad non-logic of the singles chart, it was a programme defined by bathos—by Ken Dodd, Benny Hill, and the Wombles appearing on the same programme as the Kinks, Roxy Music and Stevie Wonder. It was a raggle-taggle, an ecumenical gathering of the brilliant, the mediocre and the terrible, the novel, the twee, and even at times the avant garde. It was above all and enduringly a collection of things and people that shouldn’t have been in the same programme, let alone the same room, but instead were all forced together and told to pretend to have a good time. What could be more Christmassy than that?
This made it a hard watch, but also made the luminescent moments all the brighter—everyone from Deborah Levy to Lorraine Kelly has said seeing David Bowie on TOTP was formative, and moments of revelation were possible for young people through the ages: imagine at the end of the Seventies, amid Cliff Richard and Brotherhood of Man, seeing the Specials or the Selector; or imagine, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, amid a sea of Stock, Aitken and Waterman records, encountering something as bracingly extreme as early rave music; or as singular as Soul II Soul, or Nirvana, or the Orb, or David Gedge of the Wedding Present.
By accident (many of the early episodes, including early Christmas specials that looked amazing, were wiped because it was assumed they would have no enduring historical or cultural value), TOTP charted the development of a new artform. Postwar popular music was an explosion in creative, social and industrial activity driven by the progressive, competitive tribalism of youth culture—a sense that one new thing would always be followed by another, from rock ‘n’ roll through to beat, soul, new wave, rap, dance and so on—and the extraordinary speed with which music production developed. In 1955 Elvis Presley was bashing out “Mystery Train” and other songs for Sun Records one live take at a time; 12 years later the Beatles and George Martin were stitching together “A Day in the Life”; less than ten years after that Kraftwerk were making Autobahn. This pace of change meant records belonged absolutely to their time, giving them a unique evocative power: a record that was made in 1983 couldn’t have sounded that way in 1993 or 1973. Whereas a mainstream record made today sounds much like one made 30 years ago. When the possibilities of recorded sound reached a frontier, so did popular music.
This sense of stasis was evident everywhere by the time TOTP was nearing its end in the 2000s. In the 1970s the audience, the presenters and the performers are all distinct entities: some of the latter look like they have been beamed in from another planet—Kate Bush, Siouxsie Soux, John Lydon and Public Image Limited. The audience look and behave like teenagers as I remember them. The braver ones mug at the camera, while others betray, in fleeting looks of embarrassment and awkwardness, that they aren’t sure whether this thing they have been told is fun, and is supposed to be for them, is even fun at all. The presenters are just as singular: tribunes of youth, but not young themselves. Alan Freeman, Steve Wright, Simon Bates and Mike Read all looked ancient. By the 2000s, these distinctions have narrowed: the three elements look much more alike, interchangeable even, and, in a curious inversion from the 1970s, many of the presenters from that time—such as Jo Whiley—have scarcely aged a day since.
As a mainstream show, TOTP could not also help but express the dark side of showbusiness, in particular the abuse of star power so prevalent then (as now). It is indelibly linked to Jimmy Savile, who was there at the first episode in 1964, a regular for 20 years, and invited back at the last recording in 2006. It was only in 2012, after he had died, that the BBC stopped broadcasting episodes he presented. It is often said that he was “hiding in plain sight”, as if he possessed some unique invisibility cloak made of sheer brazen, thuggish force of character. But the truth is Savile—the whole leering, goggle-eyed, pageboy-haired, Brentford Nylons nightmare—was so completely at home in that programme and the culture it represented that he assaulted women while he was broadcasting.
Consider that the BBC has also had to excise episodes featuring numerous other men convicted of abuse, including Jonathan King, Paul Gadd (Gary Glitter), Dave Lee Travis, Rolf Harris, R Kelly, Sean Combs and Ian Watkins of Lostprophets. Also consider that by 1976 TOTP’s terrible in-house dance troupe Pan’s People had been reformulated (following a brief experiment with male and female dancers) as “Legs and Co”, a blunt admission that their chief purpose was to titillate male viewers.
And so for all that I miss it at Christmas, TOTP should remain as a document of the past. It means we can do what we never could the first time round: cherry-pick the archive for all the good bits, the things that made pop music seem thrilling, dynamic, innovative, progressive, in a way that it likely never will be any more. It is worth finding a few episodes over Christmas, for the history lesson, and to seek out some of those points of light.
