Monday, 5 September 2016

Whatever happened to Pop Music on UK TV?

It is now over 10 years since the last edition of Top of the Pop aired and there seems to a massive hole in the TV listings. Outside of the specialist music channels like MTV there could be up to half a dozen music shows on air at any one time. The Chart Show that would flash up captions during videos telling us such things as where the act would be playing, hobbies etc. The O-Zone which featured reports in which the presenter would interview a current hot chart act in between doing something like abseiling. But in the last few years pop music has faded away in the eyes of TV execs. Some would say that the X-Factor is a show that has pop music at the fore but really the focus is on the pantomime antics of the judges as they try to get one up on the others. Later with Jools Holland can  rightfully claim to be more infinitely more credible than X-Factor but that is more aimed at the music purist than the main stream. Every now and again there is talk of Top of the Pops making a comeback  but given the crimes of Travis and Saville committed when working on the show this seems very unlikely. To amend the title of the Famous Buggles song did TV Kill the Pop Star.

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