TOTP chief says top 40 has lost its “credibility”
TOTP chief says top 40 has lost its “credibility”: Chris Cowey slams first-week-discounts for UK Singles and says the chart doesn’t reflect what’s actually popular. His arguments don’t wash. Firstly while sales are an imperfect measure of popularity there’s no immediately better one (airplay, as per the Clear Channel fiasco in the US, gives even more power to record companies, pluggers, etc.). Secondly a discounted bought record is still a record which a punter has bought because they like it or think they might.
Thirdly he exaggerates the problem. Five years ago singles routinely went one sale at £1.99 first week - in times of tighter margins this isn’t happening: singles by lesser-known artists get discounted from £4 to £3 and singles by the big hitters are full-price from day 1. This is designed to get a high first-week chart placing for up-and-coming bands, a good thing surely for a diverse charts. In fact the most blatant price-cutting marketing so far this year has been from stadium indie outfit Doves, who knocked “There Goes The Fear” down to 99p for a week and got a No.2 hit with it.
A bigger problem, you might reasonably suppose, is that the UK’s chart-based TV programme is in the hands of somebody who hates the chart and the music that’s in it: not the best qualifications for an “executive producer and director” you might think.
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Marcello Carlin on February 5th, 2008
As I’ve said many times before, Chris Cowey and the BBC deliberately slaughtered TOTP.
When staff showbiz producers - Robin Nash, Michael Hurll, Johnnie Stewart - were assigned to the programme in its golden era they didn’t necessarily know current pop trends inside out but they knew how to put on a show, a spectacle.
When the Cool Police tried to hijack the show because they thought they knew better than their audience it proved fatal.
The whole point of TOTP’s original format was that it was non-judgmental. Like the Starship Enterprise its role was to observe history rather than influence it. So you’d get Engelbert, Hendrix, Harry Secombe and Pink Floyd all in the same democratic soup bowl - 20 million viewers per week all getting exposed to different but co-existing forms of pop.
When you ask people about classic TOTP moments everyone thinks of the daft costumes of the glam era and the absurd garbs that Blackburn, Savile etc. were more than eager to don.
No one thinks of interchangeable glum indie faces told to dress down in uniform black T-shirts and jeans.
But the promotional mania also helped insert the dagger. The aggressive turn-of-the-millennium marketing was always inclined to favour the teenpop, boy bands and dance tracks that the kids invariably buy at the weekend. The result - 42 different number ones in 2000 which firmly belonged in one of only three categories; teenpop, dance and credible/established names.
The diversity which had existed in terms of chart toppers well into the nineties had been lost. There was little margin for the unexpected to triumph.
So any notion of a “diverse” singles chart at that time is illusory, and even with downloads incorporated the general pattern has not changed, apart from the slowing down of changeovers at the top - Adele’s success was so meticulously planned that it inclines nothing further than a weary shrug of the shoulder; where’s the excitement, the joy, in that?
Erithian on February 5th, 2008
In retrospect, the moment I knew that TOTP had jumped the shark was when Andi Peters brought in Tim Kash as presenter. Good-looking boy and all that, but on his first show he had a quickie interview with Michelle McManus, the Pop Idol winner, who was that week’s number one. She added a word or two to an answer so they were both speaking at once: she said “sorry” and he said something like “It’s my show”. Er no, Tim, it’s the BBC’s show and the nation’s show, and you’re just looking after it – and not very well as it turned out. A year or two later, after much fiddling and undermining (scheduled opposite Corrie for a while wasn’t it?) they shunted it to BBC2 and the writing was on the wall.
crag on April 26th, 2008
Just found this article and thought i’d give my tuppenceworth-
Excellent points re: the state of the charts , MC. Since approx 2002 the powers-that-be seem to have decided the tracks deemed suitable to be aimed at the charts should only be geared towards a certain demographic of the record buying public thus reducing the variety of different music styles promoted in the media. Why they figured this was a sensible idea either commercially or financially is beyond me.
The chart has always thrived on a feeling of “anything goes”. Even by the 90s when the days of singles gradually climbing up the charts had gone this was still the case. Now with this element of randomness, even shock the charts have became, regardless of the music within them, a much duller place.
Whats even worse is the fact that the presentation of them makes no effort to change this. Last time i listened to the Radio 1 rundown before playing the top 10 Fearn and Reggie played snippets of 5 tracks that were going to be new entries that week- then, worse still, after playing the #3 track they paused and asked “so whats number#2? Its..Duffy,(i.e the previous weeks charttopper) which means Estelle is the new #1!” then proceeded to play “Mercy”, followed by the top 40 rundown then “American Boy” thus robbing the whole thing of any sense of the unexpected. Doing it like that is hardly like to get anyone excited about the charts, is it?