THE NEW MUSICAL BOX

SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK 'N ROLL (AND TELEVISION - PART 5)

The template for how television treated music shows in future was set during the mid 1980s.

Two events - one small but growing, one massive and immediate - shone the light into the future, a future in which music was to dominate airtime on television and yet, curiously, provide less choice and edginess than ever before. I touched on the first of these landmarks in the last blog instalment, namely the launch in the UK of satellite TV and consequent access to MTV.

You can read the first four instalments in this series right here:

• Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - and Television: Part 1
• Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - and Television: Part 2
• Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - and Television: Part 3
• Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - and Television: Part 4

THE CABLE AND SATELLITE EVOLUTION

Music Television had launched on cable TV in the USA on August 1st 1981. It provided a platform for the plethora of music videos being produced and gave a visual alternative to the local radio networks. In those days, no self-respecting artist would be seen dead without making a video, such videos often cropping up in all manner of TV shows and providing useful exposure to the band and record company. MTV simply gave wall-to-wall airtime to the increasingly inventive range of videos - and certainly in the States, record sales spikes tended to follow MTV's heavy rotation of videos rather than what was playing on local radio stations. 

Here in the UK, there was very little history of cable TV. The unique TV landscape - BBC and ITV, both with public service remits - and the small geographical size of the nation tended to preclude new operators. Some new towns - such as Milton Keynes - were wired up for cable TV, but the additional programming was often low budget and locally produced. MTV became a US phenomenon and British music fans could merely read about it in the music papers and wonder what all the fuss was about. We learnt about a new breed of presenter - the Video Jockey or VJ; we heard criticisms of the domination of MTV by mainstream music - and usually white mainstream music at that. But, we couldn't experience it.

Kid Jensen - Early presenter on
Sky Channel, 1984

The saviour - if that's the right word - was to be the rapid adoption of cable and then satellite TV in the UK. First off the blocks was Sky Channel on 16th October 1983: this was the forerunner of Sky TV and was a pre-existing European network (Superchannel) which had been bought up by Rupert Murdoch. He added British presenters to the line-up and offered it to the UK's cable providers. The channel showed a wide range of music shows hosted by such as Kid Jensen and Gary Davis, but clearly, was only reaching a small audience. Murdoch was encouraged, though, to note that in those cabled homes, his new channel rapidly secured a 13% share of viewing which was greater than BBC2 and Channel 4. Expansion came in 1989 when Sky Television secured the first license for satellite broadcasting in the UK - and for those homes who bought their satellite dish and paid their monthly subscription, four new Sky channels and a host of European ones came their way.

The short-lived original BSB

A rival consortium - British Satellite Broadcasting -  was launched just a year later. It introduced the "squarial satellite dish" and four new channels of its own. Clearly, there was no room for two such operators: both had high set-up costs and were losing money. A merger took place in November 1990 and effectively, Rupert Murdoch came out as top dog and British Sky Broadcasting was born. 

In amongst the other channels available on the expanded service was MTV and a number of other music-related services.

We'll return to the treatment of music on satellite television shortly.


FEEDING THE WORLD

Band Aid recording session, November 1984 - hairstyles included 

The other key driver of how music on television developed in the nineties and beyond had small beginnings in December 1984 with the huge success of the charity single, Do They Know It's Christmas. Masterminded by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, they brought together a host of contemporary rock and pop stars to record the single under the name of Band Aid. It sold over a million copies in its first week of release alone and has since gone on to sell nearly four million units in the UK. It showed that there was a public appetite for such fund-raising works and it led to an event which (in terms of reach and success) is unlikely ever to be repeated.

This was Live Aid.

It was a massive enterprise, a dual-venue all-day concert, one at Wembley Stadium in London, the other in Philadelphia at the JFK stadium. Charity concerts in themselves were nothing new - The Concert For Bangladesh was evidence of that - but what was new was using the power of television to have the complete concerts broadcast live around the world. Geldof and Ure astutely got the BBC on board very early on and they agreed to clear their schedules for the whole event, something which would be pretty unthinkable today. The BBC were nervous though: whilst there could be no argument about supporting a charitable event, they couldn't be seen to be supporting politicisation - that would be against their charter and contrary to their policy of neutrality. 

The concert was scheduled for July 13th 1985. The show would start in London at twelve noon, play through to 10pm and then switch to Philadelphia for the US portion to kick off. The total running time was sixteen hours and featured bands such as Queen, Status Quo, Elvis Costello, U2, Dire Straits, David Bowie, The Who and - in the US -  The Four Tops, Black Sabbath, Crosby Stills & Nash, Judas Priest, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. It was a massive logistical enterprise and it ended up being watched by over 1.9 billion people across 150 countries. It showed what a powerful cause could do, it proved that satellite technology could support the huge ambition - and it pointed the way for television to act as a catalyst for bringing the world together.

Live Aid, July 13th 1985 - The Wembley Stadium Stage

TWO SIDES OF A COIN

I've dwelt a little on the birth of satellite TV and Live Aid as they have a large impact on how music shows on UK television develop in the 1990s. With more channels available, there's much more airtime to be filled. But, as anyone who's ever worked in television will know, producing quality programming takes time and money. There may be many more channels, but the total available audience stays the same and thus for the commercial networks - the majority - the 1990s sees a rush to the lowest common donominator in many cases as producers chase viewing numbers for minimal spend. Contrasting that downward curve, Channel 4 and the BBC - the networks with the greatest public service remit - experiment with new formats, change existing ones and for a while, it looks like we have a more serious approach to the creation of music shows.

Let's take stock.

Top Of The Pops - need it be said - was still alive and well on BBC1, going out live on Thursday nights. BBC2 continued with the youth-focused Def II strand which included a reasonable amount of musical content. ITV had The Hit Man And Her hosted by Pete Waterman and Michaela Strachan and Channel 4 was still searching for a replacement for The Tube which had come to an end in 1987. Not an encouraging start to the nineties, the decade of Blur Versus Oasis in the Britpop Wars.

Terry Christian wants a word....

The first big change came in June 1990 when Channel 4 launched The Word, a late-night music and entertainment show hosted by Terry Christian. It featured live performances, interviews, filmed inserts all wrapped up with its signature proto-laddish behaviour from Christian and his fellow hosts. As it went out late at night, guests were encouraged - even goaded - into adopting an "anything goes" attitude and whilst occasionally, this worked, often it was shock just for the sake of shock. But, The Word did provide a platform for some notable musical moments - the first live TV performance of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, the TV debut of Oasis and (perhaps less notably) a drunken Oliver Read singing The Troggs' Wild Thing in front of a live band.

Top Of The Pops - Big Changes

A year later and new Top Of The Pops producer Stanley Appel decided that the show needed a complete revamp: key to it was the severance of the implied link with Radio 1 by using its DJs as hosts. In their place, he brought in a team of almost unknowns, a new theme - and a relocation from the BBC TV Centre to Elstree Studios where there was more space. His view was that the show was tired, too comfy and not cool enough. Unfortunately the viewing audience saw the changes as less than exciting and following numerous complaints and falling viewing figures, the radical changes were reversed and by 1993, pretty much the old format had returned: two things that were retained included the use of Elstree and the increasing use of satellite links to beam in performances from the States.

The Hit Man And Her - Small Hours viewing for the post-club set

ITV's The Hit Man & Her had started in 1988, a rather odd production that went out very late at night and into the early hours of the morning. It was a two-hour long show produced by Granada TV and with Pete Waterman (the Hit Man - then part of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman production team) and Michaela Strachan (the Her - having moved from Saturday morning TV shows such as The Wide Awake Club) at the helm, it aimed to create "a taste of late night clubbing". It was often broadcast live from various clubs up and down the country and focused on the acts that were popular in such venues. Needless to say, several of them were from the Stock Aitken And Waterman stable. It came to an end in December 1992.

Jarvis Cocker of Pulp on The White Room

Channel 4's next production is - in my view - one of those great "if only" shows: The White Room, a more serious take on music programming that was hosted by Mark Radcliffe. It started in June 1994 and featured a wide range of Brit-Pop and Brit-Rock stars: it was a basic no-nonsense show with live performances, an attentive studio audience and several acts playing live in turn. It also had some interesting live collaborations such as The Kinks' Ray Davies singing Waterloo Sunset with Damon Albarn. It was a less frenetic version in some ways of a show that had been running on BBC2 for a couple of years, and a show to which we shall return shortly: Later With...Jools Holland. Sadly,The White Room never commanded a large audience and it came to an end in 1996.

Later that same year, Chris Evans, who had fronted  a popular entertainment show Don't Forget Your Toothbrush for Channel 4, returned to the station for a new show created by his own production company, Ginger Productions. This was TFI Friday, ostensibly an entertainment show with competitions and features, but a show that became renowned for the quality and range of live music that it promoted. For its five seasons - 1996 - 2000 - it featured acts as diverse as The Stereophonics, Ringo Starr, Fun Lovin' Criminals, Garbage, James, Rod Stewart, The Dandy Warhols and The Divine Comedy. It was worth watching and wading through the less thrilling sections to see the live acts and it was a shame when the show ended in Millennium Year. It ran to an impressive 188 editions in its five year run.

The Spice Girls with an extra Ginger Spice on TFI Friday

Kerrang! TV - It's a bit loud

As the 1990s progressed and more and more viewers had access to Sky TV and the myriad of channels that it now hosted on its platform, it was clear that the terrestrial channels had a fight on their hands. Falling viewing figures, more competition for bands and artists to appear live and the proliferation of all-music TV channels alongside MTV. These included VH1 (now part of the MTV brand) and a series of brand-related channels. These were channels closely associated with some form of musical brand and included Kerrang! TV (based on Kerrang!, the weekly heavy rock and metal music magazine) and Q TV (based on the glossy monthly music magazine that was aimed at the slightly more mature music fan). Few of them went out on a limb and most of their programming was a series of videos and other promotional material: but they did fragment the music viewing audience even more.  

The BBC, alone, weathered this onslaught.

MEANWHILE, LATER ON

One of the most interesting aspects of BBC2 when it first launched in 1964 was the nightly arts and discussion strand, Late Night Line Up. It was broadcast five night a week and in those days of television that *closed down* overnight, it was one of the few shows that would sometimes go into the wee small hours: it was allowed to broadcast on an "open-end" format for a while meaning that, if for example an interview or performance was running over and was still full of steam, it could continue to a satisfactory conclusion. Many celebrated BBC presenters were associated with the show, none more so than Joan Bakewell, Tony Bilbow and Philip Jenkinson. It was a key element of BBC2's output and it came to an end in 1972. 

XTC - Live on The Late Show

Pleasingly, in 1989, it was revived to some extent by a new BBC 2 production, The Late Show. It too went out late at night, five nights a week and had a number of different hosts and involved interviews, discussions and the arts. A key element was the inclusion of regular live music - and some pretty heavyweight acts were brought in such as Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and The Stone Roses. Indeed, music got quite a good deal as there were live versions of the show covering The Mercury Music Prize - and it featured the last live TV performance by XTC whose front man, Andy Partridge suffered badly with stage-fright and disliked playing in front of audiences. The show itself ended in 1995, but not before a spin-off all-music show had been launched.

This was Later....With Jools Holland which launched in 1992.

In the next - and final - instalment of this series, I'll take a more detailed look at this show. 

The musical landscape has changed beyond all recognition since Later...started in 1992 and I'll also examine the rather thin pickings of other music shows on TV including the end of Top Of The Pops and Pink Floyd playing live for the final time at Live 8.

Join me then.

Alan Dorey

16th February 2013