WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH PICK OF THE POPS?

I confess that I don't actually listen to Pick Of The Pops on Radio 2 any more. What I now do instead is follow the progress, or otherwise, of the show live on Twitter every Saturday afternoon, seeing what Gambaccini's playing, what he has left out, and the general reaction of the social media stalwarts who still listen to the show as religiously as they moan about it. While that's happening I listen to that week's full Top 40 via Spotify (with YouTube Music fallback for the hits which Spotify doesn't have) and imagine that I'm having a much more enjoyable listening experience.

I'm not sure what the point of Pick Of The Pops is any more. Listening to some old editions with Alan Freeman, uploaded by Rob Chapman and others, it is clear that the show's main attraction was its present tense. Prior to that week's Top 20, which Fluff usually played in full (banned records notwithstanding), there would be a stream of dizzyingly eclectic new releases; everything from the Chambers Brothers to Tony Bennett. All barriers were down, there was no musical snobbery, everything was equally valid (which is oddly if logically reflected on streaming - the chief revelatory factor of Spotify etc. is that if you listen to it on a first-rate laptop with the aid of good headphones, all pop sounds great, even the stuff you had hitherto loathed for half a lifetime).

This was all happening now - even in the "now" of, say, 1969 (who else would have been playing Rotary Connection for six months straight?) - and the show's nowness was clearly crucial. But in the "now" of 2022, there is only the past tense to apply to POTP, and I think the format is selling itself abysmally short. It may well be, as with Radio 2 in general, the programme has become Too Big To Fail - hence the persistent risk-averse, play-safe aura which encumbers and may yet suffocate it. Nothing wrong with Paul Gambaccini as a person or broadcaster - quite the reverse - but he sounds tired and somewhat dissolute presenting the show (it is a ghost's step away from being voice-tracked in a damp basement on a gloomy Wednesday morning) and the air is redolent of passions spent. When Gary Davies or Scott Mills comes in to understudy for him, the difference in approach is as though windows had been opened and the sun allowed to stream into the studio.

If the presentation is necessarily stuffy, then so too are the musical choices. If Pick Of The Pops is to serve as anything beyond an aide memoire for the residents of care homes - not an unworthy function; far from it - then it has to regenerate itself. Its purpose now shouldn't be a timid reshuffling of thoroughly dated detritus of nostalgia - does anyone need to hear "Hold On Tight" or "Heaven Is A Place On Earth" for the millionth time? - but to pinpoint those moments which elude the algorithms of oldies radio programming, i.e. to play the hits you never hear (on the radio). Additionally there has to be context - you have to play the naff adjacent to the great, otherwise it makes no sense; it becomes standard corporate oldies radio in a slightly more orderly order. You have to realise, or be reminded, how and why certain records sounded great in their original surroundings.

Equally, enough with the brand awareness on the station's back. Now, anything remotely "rock" is automatically excluded from POTP, on the unspoken premise that "this is 6 Music material." Were the nineties really only about soporific AoR balladeers or cover versions/reissues/remixes/samples of familiar old stuff, or is Radio 2 so scared of rave culture that they stutter "um, this is Radio 1 stuff"? It isn't. Radio 1 is far too busy playing the pop music of now (rightly so; it's what that station ought to be doing). Even on its occasional Bank Holiday throwback specials it only goes back as far as 2000. Quite right too; the nineties are what kids' parents were listening, or more importantly dancing, to.

I frankly don't see why POTP bothers with its second hour at all. Everybody on social media groans, says they won't waste their time listening to a blanded-out 1990s or 2000s list - and why should they? What sort of audience is Radio 2 hoping to hook using this approach? More importantly, though, the common consensus surrounding The Charts had more or less evaporated by the nineties. They were no longer the event they had been in the seventies or early eighties, which could unite a nation or at least its rivalries. Charts after about 1985 have tended not to stick in the collective consciousness. This is in great part because they descended from a genuine barometer of public interest to a competition between the marketing departments of different record companies. So, with only a very few exceptions (e.g. Blur versus Oasis), there is no common stock to be harvested from these charts. They are not remembered by the public, only by chart completists and specialists.

What is the solution? If I were Bob Shennan, Jeff Smith or Helen Thomas, I would want to try to rejig Pick Of The Pops quite radically, if not violently. If you go somewhere like Digital Spy, the dedicated POTP thread is usually taken up these days by chat about other retro-chart shows being broadcast - e.g. John Peters' Vintage Chart shows on Boom Radio, which will venture into waters which the BBC fears to tread.

My recommendation would be to adopt the policy observed on Andy Noax's excellent Sunday teatime shows on Birmingham's Switch Radio. That is, feature just one year throughout the whole two hours, and expand the relevant chart's range from the Top 20 to the Top 40. In two hours of radio time you're never going to be able to play all forty songs unless you're doing a fifties/early sixties chart, in which case you could probably play them all. You'd be able to programme a maximum of 28 or maybe 29 songs, which means that some will get missed out. But you can't please everybody, and the expanded range would certainly be better than the rather cramped scenario we have now.

 

In addition, Andy Noax is politely adamant on skipping certain songs which get played on oldies radio perhaps a little too frequently, and this is entirely admirable. I think Radio 2 needs to demonstrate a lot more courage and let those barriers down again, as was Alan Freeman's original intention. If they won't play, for example, Motörhead because they're worried that listeners will flee to Heart FM; well, frankly, let 'em. It isn't what a publicly-funded radio service is set up to do. But yes; do two hours of a seventies or eighties Top 40 on a Saturday (really you need three hours to play a Top 40 in full, but that means that poor Rylan would lose an hour of his show and then where would we be?). As for charts of the nineties, noughties and beyond - well, all hope is not lost; I would suggest doing a parallel show on a different day, perhaps on 6 Music, if they have the time or space for it. That way everyone would be pleased and you could play all the rave classics you wanted.

 

Oh, and give someone else the chance to present the show (and maybe give Gambo back his America's Greatest Hits show while you're at it). I could do it quite splendidly but nobody's ever heard of me and I'm much too old to be this era's Tom Browne!