Bear in mind that I am actually younger than Channel 4 is. As such, you won’t find me waxing lyrical about Max Headroom or Minipops. This is, I’m afraid, strictly 1990s onwards.

These are in no particular order, just what I thought would flow well.

Brass Eye

Following The Day Today, Chris Morris took the skewed news concept a step further with Brass Eye. The programme was sometimes controversial, with everybody specatcularly failing to ‘get’ the paedophile episode. Brass Eye highlighted and parodied media wrongs. Here is a clip about the Bad Aids.

Jam

Most people seem to be choosing Brass Eye in these lists, as have I. But I was more fond of one of Chris Morris’s other Channel 4 programmes, Jam. This disturbing sketch show was shot with strange visual effects and set to a constant background track of ambient music. Quite unique and strange, it really set itself apart from other sketch shows.

The programme often dealt with subject matters that might be seen as taboo. But you can’t help thinking, “doesn’t he have a point?” It would be irresponsible of me to compare this sketch to any recent news events.

4Later

4Later was a strand of late-night programming that ran for a few years earlier this decade. The range of programmes was pretty eclectic. Low budget games and DVD review shows Bits and Vidz were cult classics. Disinfo Nation was an “alternative news programme”. 4Later was the home of the last series of Babylon 5. Late Night Poker was the original poker programme that started the craze. A remixed version of Chris Morris’s Jam was perfectly suited to the late-night vibe.

It is such a shame that 4later was unceremoniously axed, taking with it all of its good programmes. Late nights on Channel 4 simply haven’t been the same since.

One of my favourite programmes on 4Later was The Trip, which mixed archive film footage with arty music. I’m so delighted to have found some clips of it on YouTube! It was just perfect for the late-night slot, and well worth staying up for, especially since the feeling that you were about to drop off just added to the vibe. It is probably fair to say that, combined with Jam, this programme shaped my taste in music a lot in my mid-teens.

The Big Breakfast

Kudos to Channel 4 for trying something different with the morning slot. Normally, if you don’t want news or children’s programmes, you can forget about morning television.

It was a tricky balancing act though. It was sometimes unwatchably chaotic, and sometimes seemingly the whole programme was on the verge of complete collapse. At times it also seemed as though they were all just having fun for themselves and completely forgot about the viewer. I found this particularly during the Johnny and Denise phase.

I was quite fond of the programme in its later years. But for whatever reason, the viewing public switched off. Channel 4 tried something similar with its replacement, RI:SE, but it completely misfired. The Big Breakfast had some kind of magic ingredient that made it work for a few years in the 1990s. But today, we are back to the usual diet of news and children’s programmes. Anything else would just feel wrong.

This isn’t a particularly special clip, but it is typical of the kind of material that was featured on The Big Breakfast in its later years. Nigel Buckland, presenter of late-night film show Vidz, reviewed some Christmas DVDs in 2002. You might see what I mean when I say the programme was a bit shambolic.

The 11 O’Clock Show

It is true that The 11 O’Clock Show was sometimes embarassingly bad. This was bound to happen when it was broadcast daily (soon cut back to three days a week). I still thought it contained more good jokes per week than just about any other programme. Still, it was all too easy for the programme to lapse into telling easy cock jokes.

Let’s not forget, though, that it was the early home of Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais. The huge writing team also had some great names working for it. Charlie Brooker leaps out in my memory. So it’s not as if it had unfunny people working for it. It was worth tuning in to wait for the good bits.

At the time, the programme was perhaps most famous for Iain Lee’s vox pops. Sometimes I got the feeling that the people in the vox pops were told what to say, but they were still funny nevertheless. This one doesn’t look like it has actors, but it does contain lots of dirty jokes about bodily fluids.

Whose Line is it Anyway?

I guess with the improvisational nature of the show, it was bound to be hit and miss. But when it was hit, Whose Line was hysterically funny. It has also stood the test of time rather well. The American version is screened regularly on Five US, and recently the UK version began to be shown on Dave. I find that it’s well worth giving it a look whenever it’s on because there is likely to be at least one laugh-so-much-you-cry moment.

Here is a ‘hoedown’ game from one of the later series of the UK version. Tony Slattery is obviously near his lowest point here which isn’t good to see, but nevertheless it is very funny.

Father Ted

This programme surely needs no introduction. The silly sitcom is the best of the past fifteen years in my view. Here is the classic moment from the Christmas special when Ted, Dougal and others get lost in Ireland’s biggest lingerie section.

The Chart Show

I can just about remember a time when The Chart Show was not The ITV Chart Show. A few months ago I found myself getting very nostalgic and watching lots of videos of old episodes of The Chart Show on YouTube. It was so different to the other music programmes on offer, with nothing in the way of live performances, and no presenters apart from quirky Amiga graphics.

Of course, nowadays most music programming is like this because it’s the most cost-effective way to do it. But even watching The Chart Show today, it has its own little quirks. The whole ‘FFWD’ / ‘RWND’ stuff was a bit gimmicky, but remained in one form or another until its last show in 1998.

For some reason, all of the Channel 4 versions have been removed from YouTube, while many ITV episodes remain! Here is a clip from not long after the change of channels in 1989.

The Crystal Maze

Is this the greatest gameshow ever? Yes. The Crystal Maze also must be one of the very few programme adaptations to be better than the original it was based on. Fort Boyard was good, but bland in comparison to The Crystal Maze.

Partly this is down to the ingenuity of the puzzles, and the different zones. But a lot of it is also down to the charismatic Richard O’Brien. His sarcastic comments just sum it up whenever the team messes up, which it invariably does. And of course, he had that harmonica to hand whenever he felt like putting the team off. And then there was that strange relationship with the computer in the futuristic zone…

Popworld

While the staid BBC subjected the nation’s youth to Fearne Cotton’s asinine interviews with boring boy bands, over on Channel 4 you could watch Simon Amstell being sarcastic to them. Some bands played along with it, while others took great offence. And who would believe it, it was those wankerish indie bands who were worse than the bubblegum pop groups. Essential viewing for weekend mornings, as I have already written on this blog.

But no surprises as to what was number 1:

1. Big Brother’s Big Saviour. This post about Russell Brand stormed to the top of all sorts of mucky Google searches after some person in the comments mentioned Imogen’s sex tape. Disgusting. This page accounted for over 10% of all visits to this blog this year!
2. Richard Hammond. Descended into a debate about whether it’s disrespectful to dislike somebody (Steve Irwin) even though they’re dead.
3. Weekend mornings are meaningless once again. Simon Amstell left Popworld, but most people were only interested in searching for pictures of Miquita Oliver.
4. Another new Freeview channel. This post lays into smileTV, Freeview’s mankiest channel. People arrive at this page looking for information on Freeview channels. I imagine this post is a good advert.
5. Countdown to PS2’s Formula One 06. I’m still a little bit peeved that the actual review I wrote for this game is nowhere near as popular. Gah.

A few posts from 2005 were actually more popular than some of these, but they don’t count right because we’re talking about 2006.

The ‘popularity contest’ plugin, which also takes into account things like comments and whatever else, comes up with a slightly different result:

1. Big Brother’s Big Saviour
2. Another new Freeview channel
3. Weekend mornings are meaningless once again
4. Time Trumpet. I can’t even remember what I wrote in this post.
5. MySpace UK seems to have launched. Check out the comments full of emos who are shocked at the way I diss their Space.

So there you have it. My five (or seven) best posts of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it. Although I can deduce that April was a stupidly popular year. Hmm. I will try and get some kind of Reddit- / Digg-style voting plugin for this blog. That would probably be much better.

Okay, how else can I look at last year? What music I’ve listened to. I know I still haven’t posted my top ten albums of 2006 yet. I promise that is coming. But Last.fm offers a handy way to track what you listen to, and a glance at the rolling year chart on this day allows me to have a look at what I listened to over the past year. This will change tomorrow, so it’s worth taking a note of, if you’re interested in that kind of useless information.

1. Boards of Canada (851)
2. Radiohead (674)
3. Pulp (624)
4. Broadcast (615) — I don’t remember listening to this much Broadcast?!
5. Autechre (607)
6. Squarepusher (588)
7. The Fiery Furnaces (579)
8. Tortoise (472)
9. Aphex Twin (384)
10. Prefuse 73 (366)

Perhaps the most surprising thing (apart from how high Broadcast are) is how low Autechre are. For the most part though, this isn’t too different to my all-time top ten on Last.fm.

As for the tracks chart, apart from two tracks that appeared on two different releases (thus probably getting twice as many listens as they otherwise would have), all of my top ten is made up of tracks from Florida by Diplo and Everything Ecstatic by Four Tet. I got both of those albums for last Christmas. So that is probably proof that I don’t spend nearly as much time on the computer as I used to. The chart will probably look completely different at the end of the month.

I can understand what they mean. There can’t be a single person in the country who hasn’t heard this song now. I guess when a single has been at number 1 for longer than any other single since ‘Love is All Around’, you really know it’s time to pull the plug. I saw them on Popworld* at the weekend playing quite a different version of it. It was a really groovy slow version, much better than the original. I would totally buy the album if that version was on it!

But when I first heard the song I was quite disappointed. The first time I ever heard of it was when a friend told me that Danger Mouse was going to become the first person to reach number 1 on the strength of downloads only. And my reaction was just, “QTF new Danger Mouse material?!?”

Prior to Gnarls Barkley, Danger Mouse was probably most famous for the absolutely immese ‘Grey Album‘. Having heard that it was hard to resist investigating his other releases.

His collaboration with Jemini, ‘Ghetto Pop Life‘, is my personal favourite of his, while ‘The Mouse and the Mask‘ by Danger Doom is also excellent, despite the fact that so many references go straight over the head of somebody who’s never seen Adult Swim before (i.e. me). Apparently follow-up albums for both DM & Jemini and Danger Doom are both in the pipeline, which is good news.

‘Demon Days‘ wasn’t quite on the same level, but there were still some absolutely cracking tracks, and the last couple of tracks made a great ending to the album.

So given this good track record, I was excited to hear what Danger Mouse would come up with in this new project. But when I heard ‘Crazy’ I was pretty underwhelmed. My brother couldn’t believe it was Danger Mouse either. It just seemed so bland for Danger Mouse. I could hear that it was Danger Mouse — it wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the last Gorillaz album — but it just wasn’t a very interesting song.

Over time, though, it has grown on me, but I still haven’t opted to buy the album. I have heard some pretty mixed reviews for it. Some people say that ‘Crazy’ is boring but the rest of the album is quite good. Others say that ‘Crazy’ is great but the rest of the album is poor.

I wonder if there is a UK / America divide at work here. Maybe people in the UK think of it as a chart song first and foremost — and not the sort of thing that you even need to buy, because you hear it all over the place anyway. In the US, where ‘Crazy’ has not had anything like the impact it has in the UK, it is probably seen more as another Danger Mouse / Cee-Lo project, and the music is more likely to be judged on its merits alone.

I guess I will buy the album if the next singles (if there are any) are good. That’s what I did with ‘Speakerboxxx / The Love Below‘, which ended up being an excellent album.

* While I’m on the subject of Popworld I may as well write what I think about the new series, following on from my post mourning the loss of Simon and Miquita.

The new series has, thankfully, tried to retain its humorous edge. But that makes it all the more strange that they have chosen that lump of uselessness Alex Zane to present it. He is not even a quarter as funny as he thinks he is. In fact, if anything, Alexa Chung has ended up being the funny one. She has come up with some brilliant lines:

Duncan from Blue: When I was in Blue all of the music was done using computers…
Alexa: Ah cool, electro!

I could hardly care less about TOTP and CD:UK, but Popworld is a different matter. It could probably have carried on for a good deal longer, but Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver have decided that it’s time to quit before the show gets too stale.

It’s good logic because the whole appeal of Popworld was that it was so refreshing. In the world of music television there is usually only space for overexcited bimbos to gaze on, gushing over the latest “brilliant” identiclone boyband, and for sycophants like Jools Holland to spew empty platitudes to the latest Radio 2 fodder on his supposedly grown-up but actually dire programme.

Popworld offers none of that. It’s easy to see why Popworld was such a slow burning success. When it was launched five years ago it was shoved away on a daytime slot on the then-fledgling E4 channel which was originally only available to one man and his dog — if they had a satellite dish. Even with its weekly Channel 4 programme it didn’t initially get much attention. Given the state of music programmes, it’s hard to get excited about the appearance of another one.

But when you were flicking through the channels, it was easy to see that Popworld was trying to be something different. More than just a pop show — a pop show that you want to watch, something that will make you laugh. I remember, for instance, some early episodes with Leigh Francis — some might not forgive Popworld for giving him a springboard, but he was genuinely funny back then. Meanwhile, Simon Amstell — who was sacked from his previous job as a presenter on Nickelodeon for being “too sarcastic” — sat on the sofa telling his funnies with one eyebrow permanently raised. Popworld was a comedy show as much as it was a music programme.

A typical Simon Amstell performance was when he recently interviewed Take That (minus Robbie Williams) who were about to embark on a reunion tour. Amstell began the interview: “This is great, but I think there’s something missing…” The members of the band looked at each other and mumbled something about Robbie Williams before Amstell chirruped, “No no no! I meant my water!”, as a bottle was passed to him.

Because of moments like that, Popworld gradually became a must-watch television programme. Criminally, (although in the past couple of years it moved to Saturday and had some late-night repeats as well) it was originally shoved away on a Sunday morning slot at about 9am on Channel 4. That made it difficult to watch many episodes. There aren’t many things that could get me up that early on a Sunday morning, but the promise of Popworld did more than a few times.

On the sofa, Simon and Miquita made its guests work hard for their respect. They weren’t prepared to paint a grin on their faces if a song was rubbish or if an interviewee was giving them banal answers. They would make a stand against it, as though they were the voice of the poor music fan who has to sift through all this crap. As this interview for The Observer reveals:

Does [Amstell] know whether or not [Simon] Cowell approves of Popworld? ‘I don’t know,’ he says, adding more firmly, ‘but I do know that we don’t approve of Simon Cowell.’

And don’t think it was just plastic pop stars who suffered on Popworld. Too many people give preening, posing indie bands the benefit of the doubt, the idea being that somehow holding a guitar makes a band less fake and harder-working. But most rock bands are just as bad as all the rest and Popworld knows it. That’s something Jools Holland could learn from them.

But it’s a bit too simplistic to say that Popworld just is a sarcastic programme and that Simon and Miquita only take the piss out of popstars. It genuinely loves music. If the music was good and the personalities were interesting, Popworld would recognise it. And the best interviews were always the ones where the guests could take the joke and play along. The Kaiser Chiefs got my respect as they always got into the spirit of the programme.

One regular feature from the recent past was Toolbox Jury, where a guest would review the week’s new pop videos by pulling items out of a toolbox (with larger tools meaning a better review). I won’t easily forget the time when one of the blokes from Bros seedily grinned as he selected his item from the toolbox and declared, “I’ll give Destiny’s Child a little screw.”

Contrast this jollity with the time when a nonplussed Gwen Stefani refused to accept Amstell’s gift of some cheese. Gareth Gates would only do a performance, not an interview. Girls Aloud, Rachel Stevens and The Kooks refused to appear on the programme ever again after uncomfortable interviews. Acts like Coldplay and Madonna were often derided for refusing to appear. Britney Spears also walked out of an interview. That’s fitting — Oliver, who was 16 when she first presented, apparently got the job because she called Spears an idiot. Easiest job interview evar!

Sometimes you could say that Amstell went too far. In recent years Popworld had grown much bigger balls, and sometimes they went further than just taking the mick as Amstell resorted to being unduly weird or offensive just to get a reaction. Was it really unreasonable for Gwen Stefani to repeatedly refuse to tickle him? And is it really such a surprise that Alex Parks reacted badly when he asked if her girlfriend had “nice honkers”?

Thankfully such instances were few and far between, and the programme worked much better when they stuck to their core ethos which Simon and Miquita explained in this article in The Observer:

‘If you don’t come in because you’re worried we’re going to take the piss then you must think we have the ammunition, so that means you think you’re shit,’ shrugs Amstell. He and Oliver recall an encounter with an unamused Ronan Keating, who they interviewed in the style of a police interrogation: ‘I put it to you that life is not a roller coaster, it’s a teacup ride, because it’s so boring.’ Oliver sighs: ‘If only he’d just relaxed and laughed, then it would have been fun.’ Quite.

Thinking about it, the Keating incident may lie at the heart of what has made Popworld so special. Watching someone like Keating bristle at silly ‘beneath-him’ questions, or Stefani sourly refusing cheese (or a ‘tickle’ from Amstell), behind their eyes it is as if they are screaming: ‘What happened to the untouchable celebrity dream? I bet Frank Sinatra didn’t have to put up with this!’ What Popworld is good at is highlighting the gulf between what celebrities want from fame (non-critical adoration, respect) and what they actually get (automatic ridicule; talking horses). How they deal with this, in situations such as they find on Popworld, has become a modern celebrity litmus test of cleverness and humour – some pass, some don’t.

And this article in The Independent.

All of which may sound hugely mean-spirited. You might argue that it’s pop TV, not Paxman. Their defence: it’s because they care about good pop and “proper” pop stars that they get frustrated with people such as Keating.

“When you’re coming out of an interview that’s been quite boring, you can’t really say, ‘Wow, that Rachel Stevens, what a laugh!’ The public just saw the conversation,” says Amstell.

In short, Popworld is about a genuine love of music and escaping the media world of sycophancy, banality. Why give these people an easy ride? But at the same time, it’s not about a hatred of celebrity either. Acts that could take some gentle teasing always came across well. Aloof, boring or bad bands — deserving targets — got the harshest treatment.

There can be no doubt that Amstell is the driving force behind Popworld’s distinctive nature. A year or two ago I saw Miquita Oliver presenting a Craig David special on late-night Channel 4 and it was soul-destroying. On Popworld, Craig David is one of the prime victims (a regular feature was Craig David’s Diamanté Ball Bag). But on the Craig David special, Oliver was just as sycophantic as all the other boring music programmes. So it was natural that when Amstell decided to move on, Oliver had to go as well. Pretty useful for Channel 4 as well, who were probably getting worried that so many acts were refusing to appear on their flagship music show.

The new presenters are unfunnyman Alex Zane (why?) and Alexa Chung (who?). I think they must be hoping that in the haze of Saturday morning hangovers, the majority of the audience won’t notice the difference. Popworld fans will be hoping that it can somehow retain its cheeky sense of humour. But I and many others fear that it will probably be absolutely rubbish.

Let’s just hope that Simon Amstell ends up with a late-night music show!

• Popworld on Wikipedia
• Feature in The Guardian Guide from 2004
• The new TOTP? Get up on a Sunday — The Guardian article from 2004
• The official site — broken on decent browsers

Update: According to this thread on TV Forum, unfunnyman Alex Zane is being lined up to replace them. Grrrr. Apparently, with Simon taking the piss out of everybody all the time, Popworld was having trouble booking guests. Bloody celebrities.

Update the second: Via Prolix comes this brilliant interview with the two. They’d both leave you know. Yup.

It’s hard to think that just a few years the Top of the Pops brand seemed unstoppable. It was so well-known that it used to often be referred to simply as ‘TOTP’. Ask people what TOTP is these days and they’ll probably think it’s some kind of sexually transmitted disease. There were numerous spin-off shows — but Top of the Pops 2, TOTP+ and Top of the Pops Saturday have all now disappeared from our screens.

Even the original Top of the Pops itself has the Sword of Damocles hanging over it. It’s finally been shoved off BBC One after what must have been years of trying. I remember in the mid-1990s it was shoved off into the killer slot of Friday at 7:30pm, a slot which every channel apart from ITV1 seems to struggle badly in. That’s a stupid place for a programme based around the chart to be, because it ends up referring to a pop chart that’s a week old. Compare that to the closest relation to TOTP, CD:uk, which tries to second-guess Sunday’s chart on a Saturday.

Top of the Pops under Andi Peters has been really weird aswell. It seems stuck in the 1990s — the theme tune, the graphics, the whole style and the cheesy voice-overs all seem painfully outdated for a programme that’s presumably supposed to be on the pulse of the nation’s youth. To solidify that feeling, Bananarama were performing on today’s edition.

The charts are increasingly irrelevant to the nation’s youth anyway. Do many people actually care about the charts any more? I don’t think many kids are interested in the slightest. They’re probably more interested in ringtones (case in point: Crazy Frog is still at number 8 months after it was released, with another Crazy Frog single due to be released in a couple of weeks).

What role does a pop show play these days anyway? What audience is it after? I mean, ignore the fact that it’s a pop show and you’ll see that Top of the Pops usually contains quite an eclectic mix. A bit of rock here, some hip-hop there, and a bit of bubblegum thrown in for good measure. There isn’t much of a crossover, and any rock fans watching TOTP will switch off when the bubblegum comes on; any bubblegum pop fans won’t be watching for the rock (well, unless the rock band in question is Green Day!).

Rock fans will instead probably be watching Kerrang or one of the other music channels. There are dozens of music channels, often distinguished by genre, but almost all with a definite pop slant. It’s not as if anybody would tune in to Top of the Pops just to get a feel of a cross-section of the chart. Probably about 95% of the radio stations in the country offer this. If you’re addicted to your television, there are countless television channels churning out any old video anywhere near the top 20.

The problem with Top of the Pops is that it’s falling into the trap of trying to cater for as many people as possible. The result is a watered-down mish-mash with no value whatsoever. Top of the Pops moved to BBC Two today. It should have taken this opportunity to truly distinguish itself from other music programming; to offer something different. Instead, it’s done the complete opposite.

I can almost imagine the frantic meetings, of channel controllers playing pass the parcel, trying frantically not to end up with this albatross-shaped hot potato. BBC One wants the flagging TOTP gone from its elite channel. BBC Three — the youth channel, remember — is not remotely interested in TOTP. BBC Two already has TOTP2.

Then somebody hits on the idea. Why not merge Top of the Pops with TOTP2?

GENIUS.

Er, no. Complete and utter rubbish more like. What we have now ended up with is a pop music show which has just moved to a Sunday at 7pm slot to try and make it somehow ‘fresher’ with a hot-off-the-press pop chart to talk about. But with crusty old twenty-year-old footage bunged in the middle. So the mish-mash predicament is now even worse. How many people interested in contemporary pop music are going to be happy with today’s programme, which shoved in old footage of Take That and Madness? Not only that, but obviously these vintage performances were shot in the old ‘square’ 4:3 ratio, and had to be cropped to the modern widescreen 16:9 ratio for broadcast. In today’s broadcast of his performance from the 1980s, Suggs twice stood up only to be decapitated.

After the Madness performance, we are told that next week’s guest presenter alongside Fearne Cotton — whose hair is a different colour on the outside to the inside — will be Jeremy Clarkson, and that Jeremy Clarkson will be presenting Top Gear after Malcolm in the Middle, which is on after Top of the Pops. “And talking of madness…”

“Ah!”, I think, they know that the programme is complete rubbish aswell. But then it occurs to me, they are trying to do a clever link from the Madness track that ended about thirty seconds ago, before they started prattling on about tonight’s schedule on BBC Two.

It gets worse. The mish-mash mix gets another ingredient tossed in. Presumably they’re trying to grab a wider audience by having a chat in the studio with the film stars in the latest identikit Holywood film. But what has this got to do with pop music? Absolutely nothing, but to try and get away with it, presenter Fearne Cotton asks the bloke at the end if he’s been to any festivals since he arrived in Britain? “I’ve only been here about three hours.” What a great interview!!! Who is going to be impressed with this?

In the middle of the show, Fearne Cotton proclaims in her boyish half-posh half-mockney yelpy-growl, “We’re fitting in very nicely at our new home on BBC Two.” No you’re not. You’re fitting about as nicely as Kate Moss’ hot pants on Rik Waller.

Even the audience, usually famous for their unfeasibly enthusiastic applauding, arms aloft and wooping, looked comatose when this week’s guest presenter, Phill Jupitus, badly told a not-very-amusing joke.

Top of the Pops needs to serious boot up the rear. It needs to take a look at itself and see how it can fit in today’s age where single sales are falling, and besideswhich you can probably hear any chart song you want just by flicking through the music channels.

There is a role for pop music programmes today. Popworld is a prime example. Better still, Popworld is a hilarious programme. It is not at all deferential or sycophantic; it’s unafraid to take the absolute piss out of its guests. It is anarchic without being chaotic. Top of the Pops, on the other hand, is just far too twee for its own good.