End Of Era For Top Of The Pops

Even if you missed Top of the Pops you probably taped it.

After more than 40 years on the small screen, the nation's favourite bids a fond farewell tomorrow night when original presenter Sir Jimmy Savile signs off with the last ever show. With more than 2,200 editions of the show recorded, the hit programme has fallen down the listening figures and BBC bosses have decided not to sing its praises any more.

Like it or loathe it, TOTP is a national institution and it will remain imprinted on the nation's psyche for decades to come. TOTP made unknown artists household names and catapulted bands to superstar status. Had it not been for the show, bands like Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Oasis and Coldplay may not be as huge as they are.As Top of The Pops spins off into oblivion this Sunday, Mike Smartt recalls the seismic impact the first episode had in 1964 on a pop scene that, until then, catered more for dads than teenagers.

Cultural phenomena are hard to spot when they arrive. Critics said John Osborne's Look Back In Anger stank like a kitchen sink full of week-old washing up when it premiered.

It took weeks for people to realise TV's The Office wasn't a real documentary.

But Top of the Pops was never like that. Before New Year's Day 1964, when TOTP first emerged from a disused church in Salford, pop had been what Americans called their fathers and also went snap and crackle on the breakfast table.

On radio, records by real artists were played only rarely. On shows like the BBC's Saturday Club, teenagers - themselves invented just a few years earlier - had to endure cover versions instead. Not covers in today's sense, when cool stars give a new meaning to old favourites.

These were in-house singers like Vince Hill (before he became a bit famous) mauling top tunes of the day in front of an ill-rehearsed bunch of session musicians. It was as bad as that. Your dad quite liked it.

So when the Rolling Stones actually performed I Wanna Be Your Man at the start of Top of the Pops episode one, it was a revelation. Even if they did look then like a bunch of junior clerks from the Labour Exchange.

The Beatles were on too because they wanted to Hold Your Hand at number one and to cap it all, I was watching in my cousin's front room in Liverpool, the fabbest city on earth at the time.

It was clear from day one this was a programme to be missed only in the event of global catastrophe or detention for some schoolboy misdemeanour.

For years, who had and had not been on Top of the Pops dominated adolescent conversation from the moment it finished on Thursday evening right through the weekend and beyond.

Yes, much of it was naff.

Anyone who remembers a golden age of pop, when every release was another She Loves You, forgets Clive Dunn's Granddad, A Walk in the Black Forest with Horst Jankowski and everything by Engelbert Humperdinck. And Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis were unhip even then.

But the possibility every week of seeing The Who, thrashing out a potential number one with only The Small Faces to beat, and the Animals bestriding the Atlantic atop both charts with the House Of The Rising Sun, made it a joy to be spotty, British and alive. As, of course, did Pan's People.

For pubescent lads reading about the fun everyone else was apparently having in the permissive society, the TOTP's in-house troupe of dancing girls were a welcome substitute.

Everyone's mates most fancied Babs, who was to go on to marry the actor Robert Powell. But even today the thought of the small, dark one (called Cherry or Damson or something) can make the knees go weak.

It's probably a bit daft of Noel Edmonds to suggest that the BBC is ditching a great brand needlessly. Top of the Pops long ago stopped being an "appointment viewing", as it's known in media circles.

With so many charts and genres and different ways of obtaining music these days, few seem to know or care who is top of the charts any longer.

But we used to. We were Fluff Freeman's "pop-pickers" after all.

And although many of us now pick up little more than our pensions, the thrill and expectation generated by those first five notes of the instrumental version of Whole Lotta Love, which should kick off Sunday's final Top of the Pops (it'd better), still stirs a loin or two.

Talking of pensioners, there'll be Jimmy Savile. You can't have everything I suppose.