If you remember the '80s, you probably were there

Dylan Jones (centre) with the Cookie Crew’s Cookie Pryce and Susie Q
Picture: BBC/Sebastian Barfield/Plimsoll Productions

There is some dispute as to who first quipped “If you remember the ‘60s you weren’t there”, but the prevailing view is that it was American comedian Charlie Fleischer. It’s a line that stands out because the decade in which I was born is revered for its cultural earthquakes - peace, love, The Beatles and all that - which then led to another decade that embraced rock, disco, funk and punk.

The ’60s/’70s sequence is nice and neat, and comes to a full stop with the start of a decade that still seems to be treated like the uncool, oddball member of an otherwise respectable family. But were the 1980s really that bad? I became a teenager in the ’80s, which means that it, more than any other decade, should have had the greatest cultural influence on me. It’s when I really discovered music for myself, and when I passed through all the rights of passage you’d expect, starting the decade as a 13-year-old and ending it at the age of 23, in the process progressing through puberty, school and the start of my career in the media, initially writing about music. Throughout this entire time there was a lot to absorb, culturally. I’m not going to attempt to precis the 1980s in one single blog post (actually, I don’t think an an entire book could capture the decade faithfully), but music does provide a frame with which to consider the period.

It has become fashionable to rubbish the 1980s, but that may be something to with the fact that it brings back dystopian memories of the Cold War, the Reagan/Thatcher love-in, and the very real risk of someone dropping a nuclear bomb on your home. That all tempered the seemingly confected frivolity of the era’s pop music, a point not helped by those BBC Four Top Of The Pops re-runs from the time featuring  cheesy (and disinterested) Radio 1 DJs introducing badly lip-synced performances. 

This was a theme that I expanded on back in July when I interviewed the eminent force of music radio that is Gary Crowley on the occasion of his sumptuous second Lost ’80s box set coming out. “It was an exciting time,” he told me, adding that “half of those artists [in the early ’80s] were all punks, anyway.” However, as we now put a 40-year distance between now and the start of the ’80s, there is room to reconsider the decade, Crowley’s two four-CD box sets have demonstrated, though relative obscurities from some of the era’s biggest pop acts, like Wham!, Depeche Mode, Prefab Sprout, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Bananarama, just how much good music came out of a period that hindsight hasn’t always been too kind to. 

This forms the central thesis of a new four-part BBC2 series commencing tomorrow night - The 80s - Music’s Greatest Decade? fronted by Dylan Jones the former editor of GQ, The Face and iD magazines, and author of several acclaimed music biographies. “Interminable television programmes still suggest the whole episode was nothing but a calamitous mistake, a cultural cul-de-sac full of rotten records by shameful individuals with orange skin and espadrilles,” Jones says of the decade. “I’m here to tell you this couldn’t be further off the mark.” 

He believes that the ‘80s were far more inventive, musically, than the tropes about drum machines and over-produced records relentlessly suggest, and in the series calls upon figures such as Nile Rodgers, Madonna, Eurythmics, Public Enemy, Gary Kemp, Jazzie B, Trevor Horn, Bronski Beat, Bananarama’s Sara and Keren Woodward, Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, UB40’s Ali Campbell and others to prove the point. 

Key to this view is Jones’ belief that, unlike other eras, the 1980s weren’t anchored to one single genre, and the notorious tags that the music press, in particular, likes to label an artist. In fact, if you think about it, what is “’80s music”? Were Culture Club a reggae band because of Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? And what were Duran Duran, with their nodding references to Chic, Roxy Music and even the prog rock they were all fans of as teenagers? Gary Kemp - now touring as vocalist and lead guitarist with Pink Floyd founder Nick Mason's outfit Saucer Full Of Secrets readily admits to being a prog fan, and has said that even a band as symbolic of the '80s like Spandau Ballet pulled on references from previous decades. “We were influenced by Floyd,” he has said.

Dylan Jones believes that the 1980s were pop’s greatest decade, when pop became more adventurous than ever. He even thinks the decade gave the ’60s and ’70s a run for their money in terms of excitement. Pop culture, he argues, became even more inventive, “a kaleidoscopic display of musical experimentation,” he wrote in The Sun, “in which genres were born and evolved with dizzying rapidity. While music continues to fascinate to this day, it will never be as varied as it was back then.” I think he has a point.

But, then, every era has its good and its bad. “Whenever anyone tried to say the ‘70s was a period of great music - ­glam rock, disco, punk, soul etc - we had Bay City Rollers, Slik and David Cassidy thrown in our face,” Jones points out. The ’80s, by contrast, offered a “wild variety” of styles, from electro to the New Romantics, rap and hip-hop, and the early shoots of Acid House and Britpop. And that was on top of creating some of the biggest and most influential pop acts of all time, from Michael Jackson to Prince, George Michael to Madonna.

Jones’ BBC2 series explains that technology played a massive part in pop’s ’80s explosion. With the bare minimum of ability, bands could buy drum machines and synthesisers and, with the help of computers, make distinct sounds. At the same time, MTV gave a platform to pop’s third dimension: image. Image played, perhaps, an even bigger part - bigger than even during the glam rock era - with how bands identified themselves. “You’d hear something and think, ‘oh that’s Bananarama, that’s Culture Club, that’s Duran Duran’,” says Bananarama’s Keren Woodward. “Everyone looked their own way as well.”

‘Promos’, as they used to be called, had been pretty cheesy inserts for shows like Top Of The Pops and Nationwide when either the band couldn’t turn up or Pan’s People couldn’t come up with a dance routine in their place. But with MTV, record companies upped their promotional budgets, sending the likes of Duran Duran off to shoot their exotic yachting videos, and even turning Texan rockers ZZ Top turned into cable TV cowboys through slick promos that didn’t take themselves too seriously. And, then, right smack in the middle of the decade, pop reached its zenith with the “global jukebox” - Live Aid. 

Nile Rodgers, whose work on Bowie’s Let’s Dance made The Dame - and that album - one of the biggest things to happen in the 1980s - tells Jones in the series that the decade was, for many of his peers, the summit of a lot of work that had gone on before. “The ’80s was the pinnacle for a lot of us musicians who had come from the ’60s and the ’70s,” he says. “Reaching that place, you had this great explosion of artistry in the Eighties that ran the gamut.”

Jones says that one of the most surprising interviewees for the series was Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson (who also doubles as a fully qualified airline pilot, when he’s not hanging out with the band’s gruesome zombie mascot Eddie). Asked how the headbanging band became so popular in the ’80s, Dickinson explains, simply: “We were very good at our job, the audience knew that we also had a sense of humour about what we did. We were proud of our music but we tried to keep our feet on the ground.” 

As with any era there were plenty who didn’t. As a journalist in the second half of the decade I encountered some of the more highfalutin’ aspects of ’80s pop stardom, which is why Smash Hits magazine did such a wonderful job in bursting any bubbles that became over-inflated (and do read my interview with “ver Hits”’ David Hepworth and Mark Ellen for their thoughts on this).

We are quick to jump on easy assumptions about anything, and the shorthand about the 1980s was that the decade was a bit naff. That, view, though is informed more by the frivolity, the shoulder pads, the lip gloss, the…er…drug taking (not me, but I can tell you a story or two…) the “gender-bending” and all the other cheap tropes that regularly get trotted out. More objectively, the decade should be regarded for its music. Gary Crowley’s characteristically effervescent curation of the decade has repeatedly underlined that there was plenty of truly great pop. Jones’s series, I hope, will expand on this further by reminding us that amid the puffball skirts and jackets with their sleeves pushed up to the elbows, there was a lot more breadth to the decade’s music than you and I faithfully remember.

The 80s – Music’s Greatest Decade? With Dylan Jones begins on BBC2 at 8.55pm on Saturday 23 October

The rebirth of cool: the Absolute Beginners soundtrack

In my actual timeline, I am a child of the 1960s. In my self-mythology, I’m a child of the rock-pop era. There is some legitimacy to this claim: I was, after all, born in November 1967, three months after the Summer Of Love and two weeks after Hendrix recorded Little Wing. My childhood was spent in the 1970s, which meant attending the Thursday night ritual of Top Of The Pops, and bopping along to Mud, The Rubettes, Smokie, and being ever-so slightly freaked out by Alvin Stardust clad in full leather, pointing at the camera with a gloved hand bearing a large jewelled ring on the index finger.

It was only later on in the 1970s that I discovered what is now referred to as “classic rock”. This meant that my musical upbringing - until I ‘accidentally’ discovered Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album (well, taped it off my brother’s copy) - was shaped by the Top 40 tunes of the decade as a whole, which meant putting up with Peters & Lee’s Welcome Home and ABBA, and becoming mildly interested in the punky chops of Blondie, The Jam and The Police around the time I started secondary school.

By no fault other than the year I was born in, I turned 13 in 1980, which meant that the 80s were my coming of age, music-wise. This was the decade that began with the Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall at No.1 and ended with a Top 10 that included Jason Donovan, Soul II Soul, Jive Bunny, Madonna, De La Soul and New Kids On The Block. Make of that what you will. My read is that you probably can’t generalise any one era: the 50s might have given us rock and roll, the 60s the golden age of pop (or pop-rock if you prefer), the 70s rock, punk and disco, and so on, but really we’re in broad sweeping statements here.

Recent trundles about the South Coast, listening to the type of "classic hit" radio stations Peter Kay captures so brilliantly with 'Forever FM' in Car Share, reminded me that the 80s were no different. Sure, there was plenty of cheese, but no different then than now or, indeed, any era you pick. The difference, though, between the 80s and now is that - and I’m going to go full card-carrying, cardigan-wearing old fart here - there was some musical integrity, then, about Top 40 pop. You know, real instruments and no Autotune, unlike the software-infested durge coming out of the station we had on the car last week on the Isle of Wight.

So, then, a statement of the bleeding obvious: there’s something for everyone in every decade, and no one has the right to call snobbery over anyone else’s. Rant over, the reason this comes to mind is the reissue this week (and rediscovery in my vinyl collection) of an album that, in one particular way, captured a specific aspect of the 80s. Last week I blogged about the demise of Q magazine and my involvement in the launch of a near-rival in 1986, looking to break into the ‘men’s lifestyle’ market, which was being fuelled by Soho, The Face and i-D magazines, and the convergence of style, fashion and music of the early 1980s. So the reappearance of the Absolute Beginners soundtrack album has randomly evoked a phase of my musical education when the 1980s tapped into the 1950s, and jazz made an unexpected appearance. We had, of course, Sade, whose Diamond Life became a period cliché due to its association with ‘yuppie’ wine bars (though it’s true - you couldn’t avoid the record if you visited such establishments). Plus there were pseudo jazz acts like Carmel, Matt Bianco and Swing Out Sister, along with Everything But The Girl’s Eden album and even The Style Council, with their cod-jazz leanings on their debut, Café Bleu. All of it was, though, eminently cool.

Julien Temple’s 1986 screen musical adaptation of Colin McInnes’s 1950s-set, coming-of-age novel Absolute Beginners just seemed ripe for the time. It was brash, it was bold, it was colourful, it was invariably overblown - and many critics just didn’t like it - but it was, for all its many faults, relentlessly cool. Not quite the commercial and critical dud it has since been painted to be, Absolute Beginners had a certain charm - in particular, its soundtrack. Temple drafted in jazz great Gil Evans to oversee it, and in between pieces of Evans-arranged incidental music, it captured a eclectic, but jazz-themed mix from the likes of Sade, Ray Davies (in a particularly amusing skit as a put-down dad pleading for a “Quiet Life”), Patsy Kensit (on-the-money 80s casting as the film’s love interest) with her band at the time, Eighth Wonder, and even a stormy instrumental by Jerry Dammers of The Specials to accompany the film’s riot scene (a statement on the 1950s Notting Hill race riots). Paul Weller - who’d already written his own paean to the McInnes book with The Jam’s song of the same name - got on the soundtrack with The Style Council’s bouncy Have You Ever Had It Blue.

The standout contribution (inevitably, given my pronounced leanings), however, came from David Bowie. The Dame was at something of a career plateau when Temple invited him to ham it up as vampiric advertising executive Vendice Partners - himself a skit on Soho’s then-status as 80s London’s adland epicentre, replete with an intentionally fake American accent. When the film was released, Bowie was several months on from his barnstorming appearance at Live Aid, a performance in which he’d appeared with a brand new backing band (including Thomas Dolby), having discarded - as he often did - the group he’d worked with on the Let’s Dance album and its subsequent Serious Moonlight tour. Temple’s Absolute Beginners was already in production when Live Aid came around, and Bowie’s theme song for it was recorded at Abbey Road just a month before the self-style “global jukebox” was staged.

Like Queen and other acts who were given a career lift by the charity concert, Bowie’s appearance in Absolute Beginners, and his musical contribution to it, went further in cementing his legend status, but not in any obvious leap or bound. You could argue that he'd left behind artistically interesting, complex music, and that Let’s Dance had sent him fully commercial (with the mid-80s Tonight and Never Let Me Down albums widely considered creative lows). But with Temple’s film, Bowie looked like he was just having fun. As Partners, he camped it up for England, but it was the title song - all eight minutes of it, in its full version - that stood out as, arguably, one of the great entries in the entire Bowie catalogue, and certainly of that period of his career. When I saw him at Wembley a year after the film ca out, on the much-derided Glass Spider Tour (regrettably, my only experience of Bowie live), it was Absolute Beginners’ energy that made the biggest mark of the night. I could wax on further about Bowie here, but as much as we (well, I) still mourn his loss, it’s memories of his involvement in this film - both the comic acting and the impassioned theme song (not to mention another gem on the soundtrack, his cover of the old Dean Martin standard, Volare), that added another chapter - no, paragraph - to the already expansive Bowie story, and to the magic of why few bend a knee to The Dame as much as I still do.

The Absolute Beginners soundtrack, then, snapshots two eras: the 50s the film portrays, and the mid-80s in pop. Just as Live Aid, it’s near-contemporary, captured the crossover between the generations (those of the classic rock era like Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Bowie, The Who, Queen, etc, and those from the more immediate present - Madonna, Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Spandau Ballet, George Michael), Absolute Beginners sliced into a momentary phase of the 1980s, when Soho cappuccinos, Bass Weejun loafers and wearing pastel V-necks over the shoulders - essentially the entire Paul Weller vibe at the time - provided a jazz-infused, politically-minded (anti-Thatcher, Red Wedge et al) interlude to the decade that brought us puffball skirts and red braces-wearing, Bret Easton Ellis-inspired bankers with far too much gel in their hair. But above all, in just the first eight minutes of side one, it brought out a recording by David Bowie that combined so much of his undoubted talent - drama, excitement, luscious chord changes and an impassioned vocal, plus a Bowie trademark that often goes unrecognised: a honking saxophone.

My favourite aunt

I owe a great deal to the BBC. My late father worked there for 35 years (that's him, behind the camera). I was brought up in a BBC household, rarely ever watching ITV (remember, kids, there was a time when there were just three - THREE! - channels...) appreciating what the corporation provided the nation and even the world, via its television and radio output. There was also its authority. It’s journalism was beyond question, its presenters peerless. And, best of all, you could watch a film at Christmas without interruption from adverts. As a child, I was able to visit Television Centre often, thanks to my dad. I’ve sat ‘in’ Daleks, been on the Blue Peter set, met the legend that was Brian Cant and still is Johnny Ball, Crackerjack presenters and Roy Castle, and was able to get precious tickets to be in the studio audience of Top Of The Pops. OK, all that was privilege, but they still emboldened my appreciation for the institution that is the BBC.

So, I’m naturally biased towards Auntie. However, within that very nickname lies the reason it, today, comes under attack from every direction like never before. Just look at the last six weeks: politicians from both sides have accused the BBC of editorial bias towards one side or another and, now Boris has landslid into No.10, the murmurings and mutterings have begun again about the sanctity of the TV licence fee, which funds everything from the Beeb’s television output to five of the UK’s 13 symphony orchestras. Paying for a licence is therefore considered to be a contribution to the national cultural fabric.

The inescapable truth, however, is whether this is still relevant. The days when the ever-cheerful Christmas Day episode of EastEnders drew audience figures of more than 20 million - somewhere close to a third of the population - are long gone. Ditto big-budget dramas and variety shows. Even a big draw like the Strictly Come Dancing final this year lost a million viewers from 2018. Thishas nothing to do with the quality of the BBC’s output (as the profoundly anti-Beeb Daily Mail would have you believe) but, simply, the continuing drain on so-called “terrestrial” audiences (an anachronistic phrase given the availability of most terrestrial programming on catch-up services) from other places. Kids, in particular, are just as likely to be consuming television in bite-sized chunks from YouTube, mainlining Jack Whitehall box sets on Netflix, or glued to TikTok*. And with that particular service commissioning ever more ambitious series and co-investing in semi-theatrical films like The Irishman, plus the inroads made by Amazon Prime to original programming of its own, the television landscape has shifted further than I think many people with a traditional view of it realise.
*A teenager reliably informs me

30 years ago I was involved in the last great revolution in British broadcasting, the launch of Sky TV. Then, on 5th February 1989, five new TV channels were added to that landscape on a single day, just seven years after the UK had gone from three to four. Today there are around 460. Something - quite a lot, actually - has to give: if you’re watching Lisa Snowdon’s Jewellery Collection on QVC you won’t be watching Pointless on BBC1. And yet you still need to have a TV licence to watch La Snowdon flogging her sparkly wares. No wonder there have long been Tory murmurings about the licence fee (most recently, the idea of decriminalising non-payment, a thin end of the wedge), but while inevitably some of that will be down to vindictive intent, some will also be the result of free market thinking. The topic of the BBC’s funding comes up periodically, and it is always regarded by noted beard scratchers as an “existential threat”. But with the return of a weaponised Conservative government, empowered like never before and driven by belligerent strategists like Dominic Cummings, that threat is actually, now, looking very real.

Picture: BBC

The argument over the TV licence’s relevance in an age of streamed entertainment is a strong one. I’m relatively happy at paying for one, and between Sir David Attenborough documentaries, Countryfile, Mock The Week, Gavin & Stacey, Rick Stein’s foodie travelogues, Radio 5 Live and my mate Gary Crowley’s shows on Radio London (plus of course, much, much, more), I couldn’t be any happier at effectively paying a subscription fee to the BBC. Given one option in the future, with a licence fee replaced by a pic’n’mix model, I would continue to pay for BBC programming, such is the quality of its output. But with the arrival of Netflix as a producer, not just a rebroadcaster, and Sky planning to invest millions in new original productions at its forthcoming new studio complex in Elstree, programming choice to dilute BBC viewing figures is only going to increase.

Daring to mention the general election just gone, those with an agenda against the BBC have been gifted a fresh grinding wheel for their bilious axes. The accusation of editorial bias is one that I’ll defend any broadcaster from. Generally the rule is that if both left and right are accusing you of political bias, you’re getting it right. The online and even institutional bullying that broadcasters like the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg and Sky’s Kay Burley received during the election campaign was at times beyond toxic. The far left accused Kuenssberg of being a shill for the Tories, and I’d accept that her comment about postal votes looking “grim” for Labour in a live report was ill-advised. Interestingly, though, both Labour and the Conservatives have had a pop at the BBC’s election coverage, something robustly defended by election night anchor Huw Edwards in a LinkedIn blog post: “You are expected to deliver a results programme which upholds the BBC's reputation for quality and fairness,” he wrote, “but you're doing so in a world where toxic cynicism and accusations of bias (from all sides) are adding to the pressures on the entire team. And you realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades. The apparent purpose, in short, is to cause chaos and confusion.”

Edwards pointed out, validly, that unlike journalists working for certain newspaper and website proprietors (“where regulation is risibly weak and blatant propaganda can be passed off as 'news’”), broadcast journalists are obliged to adhere to strict laws on impartiality. Political interests might not always like that - such as the Tories’ petulant complaint to Ofcom over Channel 4 replacing the absent Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage with melting ice statues during a televised leaders’ debate on climate change - but on balance, the BBC in particular gets it right. Occasionally, it will get it wrong, or appear to do so, such as Kuenssberg’s gaffe and that by political correspondent Alex Forsyth, who referred to Boris Johnson winning “the majority that he so deserves” during a live broadcast. This prompted shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald to say the BBC was partly to blame for Labour’s defeat last Thursday. “I’m very worried about our public service broadcaster,” he told the Today programme on Radio 4. “I’m really worried about the drift. You’ve seen the catalogue of criticisms that [Labour is] making,” adding, “if the BBC are going to hold themselves out as somehow having conducted themselves in an impartial manner, I think they’ve really got to have a look in the mirror. We’ve got a lot to say about this.”

Labour, of course, have other things to consider when it comes to their “period of reflection” on the election defeat and, frankly, the BBC should be the least of their considerations. The Conservatives, too, should lay off the BBC. Their victory had nothing to do with the BBC and, in what was most certainly a clear strategy, in spite of the BBC. I’m as uncomfortable with Boris Johnson evading scrutiny as anyone else, but swerving Andrew Neil in favour of doing selfies with Phil and Holly on This Morning was as belligerent a dismissal of the BBC as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “disappearance” from the election campaign was a deliberate policy. Time will tell whether Johnson’s media performances in the election will come back to haunt him (hiding in a fridge to avoid an ITV reporter is not a good look, and despite his permanent ‘bumbling oaf’ comedy persona - honed on Have I Got News For You - he is as terrible a communicator as his predecessor, Theresa May). The Fourth Estate exists for a reason. The trick is how you engage it. Refusing it is counter-productive.

Picture courtesy of Huw Edwards/LinkedIn/Jeff Overs, BBC

At the weekend Lord Grade - Michael Grade, the former BBC chairman and scion of one of British entertainment’s most influential families - wrote that Neil’s rant-to-camera, goading Boris to come on his leaders' interview show, was petulant. “The situation appears to be bordering on open warfare – in which case I’d advise all concerned to take a step back and remember that it’s normal for governments and independent broadcasters to be at loggerheads.” Grade, writing in the Mail On Sunday, reminded readers that government enmity towards the BBC is nothing new, citing Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell “declaring war” on it over the ‘dodgy dossier’ row, and Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to appoint sympathetic governors to the BBC’s board following alleged negativity towards her over the Falklands War and the miners’ strike. During this election, however, Grade said that the BBC got things wrong. “I’m a huge fan of Mr Neil’s intellectually rigorous style,” he wrote, “and have been for 40 years, ever since I oversaw his selection as an unknown presenter on a London Weekend Television current affairs show. I am not a fan, however, of the way journalists such as Neil hijacked the airwaves, using humiliation tactics in a bid to force the Prime Minister to face their questions. This was a serious abuse of one’s position, and I have written to Ofcom requesting an urgent review to ensure it does not happen again.”

“The issue here is impartiality, and broadcasters have a statutory duty to respect that,” Grade continued. “It is not their job to use the airwaves to cajole and try to coerce politicians into interviews – or to shame them publicly if they exercise their right to refuse. British viewers do not want to see blatantly biased political reporting on mainstream television such as the Americans get with the Right-wing Fox News. But I fear that’s the way we are going.”

Senior Tories are now said to be staying away from Radio 4’s Today, too, ironically now that John Humphrys, and his uncompromising approach to interviewing, has retired. Nick Robinson, one of Today’s presenters, was even president of the Oxford University Conservative Association while a student. But he is still one of the most capable of political interviewers. Avoiding him is not the answer. If I had one criticism of the Tory election campaign (and I’m not going to get into lies and deceit here), it was the flimsy nature of some of the people they put up for broadcast interviews. With Rees-Mogg benched after five minutes of play over his awful Grenfell Tower remarks, the likes of Nicky Morgan and Matt Hancock were deployed, both lightweights. In fact, on one day of media campaigning, Morgan had to be augmented by Hancock. Where were the heavyweights, like Michael Gove and Sajid Javid? (I’d include Dominic Raab here, but he, too, was clearly - and correctly - judged to be too cold and toxic an Alan B’Stard to go anywhere near any broadcast outlet of influence).

But back to the BBC’s future: Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rishi Sunak, has said that the BBC’s funding model is something the government “should look at”, targeting the iPlayer service as one particular area of focus. He has also said there would be wider consideration of licence fee when the BBC’s current Royal Charter ends in December 2027. “The media industry is changing,” Sunak has said. “How people consume media is changing and it’s of course right that we continue to look at those things over time.” For once, I agree with someone from this government, up to a point. That point is where a government - any government - adopts frankly dystopian tones about the BBC. Funding is one thing, but censoring by stealth is something else entirely.

In another piece for the Daily Mail, John Humphrys has also weighed in on the darkening skies gathering over the BBC. “Much more worrying are the threats emanating from Number 10,” he wrote pointing out - as Grade did - that Downing Street leaning on the media is nothing new. “I can't think of a single prime minister in the past half century who would not, at some point in their career, have despatched the BBC director-general to Devil's Island if they'd thought they could get away with it.” But, he ended, senior BBC executives come and go, but the corporation “tends to sail on regardless. When Mr. Johnson raises the question of the licence fee, though, we are entering infinitely more dangerous waters. Make no mistake, this is an existential threat to the BBC.”

In the short term, it is something that the ‘temporary’ Minister for Culture, Digital & Sport, the newly ennobled Nicky Morgan, will no doubt be looking at as she arrives back at the desk she vacated to stand down as an MP at the election. Some on the left will regard any threat to the BBC from this government as karma for the supposed bias during the campaign. But politics aside, by 2027 when the BBC’s charter is renewed, the media landscape will have changed even further. 5G, for example, will have arrived (and even, according to the wonks at my old employer Nokia, 6G), transforming how and, notably, where media is consumed ubiquitously. Even with the BBC’s embrace of online technology, it is still largely a construct of the broadcast industry it invented almost 100 years ago. It is still, though, whether hawks like it or not, a national institution like few others, save for perhaps the Royal Family. It’s motto “nation shall speak peace unto nation”, adopted on 1 January 1927 by the newly formed Corporation to signify its purpose, was a latent symbol of a decaying empire, an empire that itself would come under existential threat 12 years later and the outbreak of war. The BBC’s purpose has clearly shifted since then, and even if people who dress up in red, white and blue to wave flags at royal weddings still see the BBC as a projection of Britain and British values, that function has long since ceased to be relevant. At the end of the day, we should just want Auntie to keep producing the best of British television and radio. We just need to figure out how to pay for it, first.

Reginald John Poulter – 7th July, 1929-18th August, 2019

We had been living with Dad having Alzheimer’s for a decade and a half. Perhaps longer. It's always possible that random lapses of mindedness going even further back were signs. In which case, I’ve got a grim future (one in eight of us - at least - will succumb to this cruellest of afflictions. Today there are 50 million people globally with the disease. By the middle of this century, that number is expected to reach 150 million).

We’re not entirely sure, either, what the trigger was, but a mini stroke some years ago followed by prostate cancer clearly contributed to a cognitive and physical decline that either caused the onset or contributed to it. Either way, it’s been a slow progression. From mild symptoms of forgetfulness, through the gradual erosion of both short and long-term memory, to an eventual end-stage when the brain and the body start disconnecting, functionally, and communication goes from barely verbal to just a hollow stare. This is Alzheimer’s: the progressive erasure of a life. I’m not being flippant by describing it in this way, but think of Marty McFly in Back To The Future, except unsuccessful in preventing himself from vanishing from his own future. More starkly, think of Die Hard’s Hans Gruber, falling away from John McLane’s grip at the top of the Nakatomi tower, only in even more, painful slow motion.

This time last year Dad went into Galsworthy House, the care home on Kingston Hill where, 12 months later, he would leave this world. His increasing immobility and a series of falls - probably brought on by the Alzheimer’s – brought us to the point where he was too much of a danger to himself and to Mum. When he fell, we needed an ambulance crew using a specialist device to lift him again. He wasn’t big, far from it, but he was a dead weight that fell at awkward angles (fracturing a vertebra, we later discovered, because it was never articulated at the time). The home was wonderful, a big old stately place. Dad had his own private room with a window looking out on his beloved Richmond Park. For the first few weeks, months even, however, he was more preoccupied with leaving it. “Are we going home now?”, he would incant, to be met by some plausible explanation-to-a-child as to why he’d be staying put, which would be repeated as often as the question it responded to.

Eventually the question loops ended as Dad accepted – mostly - his new surroundings. Occasionally, in moments of unbridled lucidity, they would surface again. Here’s where you realised that Alzheimer’s affects the brain like the CPU of an ageing laptop. The cabling between the brain’s various departments becomes frayed, forcing it to take shortcuts. Graphically, you can imagine these different sections closing down. There is compulsive, repetitive behaviour, which I always assumed was the brain trying to find a path that worked, like a guide rope leading out of a smoke-filled building.

Dad’s eventual death, in the early hours of Sunday, 18 August, was the first time in adulthood that I’d experienced the demise of an immediate relative. When we went to see his body that morning, it didn’t look all that different to his condition two days before, when I sat with him, sleeping peacefully, for the better part of an hour. I wasn’t to know he’d be dead 36 hours later, but perhaps, it wasn’t a surprise. On the previous occasion I’d seen him awake, there was no recognition of me. I could have been his son, or simply a shape before him. I thought, then, that the light was dimming. This forms the core of Alzheimer’s cruelty, the fact that you can see the physical manifestations of a lifetime, of loved ones and relationships, visibly disappearing before you. Without being too morbid, we do all turn to dust, along with our memories, but with Dad, living as he did until six weeks after his 90th birthday, it was something of a comfort that he had lived so long, even if his latter years were beset with such health problems.

Now his life is over we can reflect and recollect. In my case, even discover things for the first time, especially as we search through his fastidiously collated archives of paperwork, mementoes and obscurities which, collectively look like ephemera but by themselves carry vivid stories. We uncovered a cricket travel game called Owzthat!, which came in a tiny tin and comprised two hexagonal metal die, one each for bowling and batting scores which were recorded on a piece of paper. Simplest of pleasures, but the appearance of Owzthat!, on a wet afternoon, marooned in a rain-soaked Welsh self-catering cottage, was a bright, shining highlight of childhood. Along with Spencer, the glove puppet (another simple concept – namely, a sock with two buttons for eyes, which would generate hours of mirth). Dad was clearly someone who collected things. A holiday to a previously unvisited part of the world would necessitate the purchase of a new Ordnance Survey map for that particular area. A repeat visit would necessitate the purchase of the latest version of that map, just in case geography and roads had changed. These are just some of the adorable foibles from my own 51 years as his son, and I realise that these are just the tip of the iceberg of a life.

My elder brother, Martin, recalls even more: Dad selling his treasured old racing bike at Pitfields in New Malden to buy him a new one when money was tight; the bathroom at our old house - the one I was born in (and am here pictured outside) - which Dad, a keen photographer, turned into a makeshift dark room, complete with blackout boards for the window and a red light outside to keep out interlopers while he was developing film. My brother reminded me of just how creative Dad was: for the annual canasta 'tournament' between our parents and our aunt and uncle in Plymouth - a fiercely contested affair - Dad made a trophy out of a painted slab of Polyfilla, mounted beautifully on a piece of polished wood, with his impeccable sign-writing skills applied to the inscription. That trophy, much like The Ashes, would shuttle up and down the A303 according to the victorious participants. Dad would always be making things out of wood scraps. The garage still contains some of his tools, long since used of course. He once made a very good go-kart for my brother, fully capable of taking him around the block, using the slight slope from our road to the next for propulsion. Alas, a practical skill I've not inherited.

Perhaps this self-reliance stems from the fact Dad was born in 1929, at the end of The Roaring Twenties in the year of the Wall Street Crash, which heralded The Depression; a teenager during World War II; a husband in the '50s and father to three babies between 1959 and 1967; an elderly man in the Digital Age. He never got the Internet, or mobile phones for that matter, but he always loved being shown photographs on ours, especially of our own life adventures. Photography was his thing. Few family pictures exist without a camera strapped around his neck.

He was no Luddite, though: a trainee electrical engineer at the age of 15 in wartime Birmingham, joining the Great Barr Telephone Exchange at the age of 16, returning to London from evacuation in 1946. With an aptitude for such things, Dad was called up for his National Service on 1st January, 1948, aged 18, where he was dispatched to Catterick Barracks in Yorkshire to train as a radio mechanic in the Royal Corps of Signals. Somewhere ahead of him at Catterick was Sydney Lotterby, later to become a BBC producer and director, with Porridge amongst his many credits. While in the Signals, Dad worked on radio calibration for the Parachute Regiment, for which he managed to blag a coveted Paras' red beret, later hanging in the garage, covered in decorating paint. On being demobbed in March 1949, Dad rejoined the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer. It was here, while working out of telephone exchanges in the Surrey area, he met Mum, a telephonist at Elmbridge exchange. I have a romantic notion of Dad, up a telegraph pole, chatting up Mum, though neither ever corroborated such an idea. One thing she does remember, however, is Dad applying for a job at the BBC in 1954.

It was here, successfully employed from 1st November, 1954, that he began his 35-year BBC career, to our enormous pride and advantage as a family. It was here, too, that over the following years he earned a sequence of promotions, starting out as a ‘dolly operator’ in the camera department before becoming a camera operator full time. Eventually he would become the head of a camera crew – Crew 4 – at a time when, slowly, senior camera operators began to get credits at the end of programmes, though it wasn’t commonplace. Thanks to this, however, parts of my father’s BBC career are installed for the rest of time on the pages of the Internet Movie Database, IMDB.com, with entries for episodes of Eastenders, Doctor Who, Last Of The Summer Wine (produced by one Syd Lotterby), 'Allo, 'Allo, Hi-Di-Hi, and Only Fools And Horses (for which he’d maintain was his most enjoyable studio experience due to the on-set camaraderie between cast and crew).

Inevitably, we’d benefit as a family from his work at the BBC, getting to visit Television Centre on many occasions. I, in particular, got to be in the studio audience of Top Of The Pops (a much coveted ticket, in its day) a few times, and also met all the stars of BBC children’s TV when he was working on the All Star Record Breakers, the end-of-year special version of Roy Castle’s gentle celebration of achievement. One year I filled up an entire autograph book with the signatures of people like the Blue Peter presenters, Johnny Ball, Brian Cant and others from Play School and Play Away.

I’m buzzed by those encounters, even now, and that’s after I’ve met plenty of famous people in my time as a journalist. To the child-me they were my idols, long before I would make idols out of rock stars. In fact, early on in my career, there was a strange moment of crossover when, a couple of years before Dad retired himself, I went up to Television Centre to interview Philip Schofield (in his Broom Cupboard/Gordon The Gopher days) for Smash Hits magazine. I seem to remember Dad not being that impressed, even though the interview took place not far from a production office where he himself had worked. In 1988 I joined the fledgling Sky TV, and the sort-of family footsteps progression was complete. I was, however, hardly a media brat. I was never encouraged to work in the media. But I know how proud - secretly, perhaps - he was that I’d carved out a career in the industry. When I moved into technology with Philips, we had something new in common, given his army and telephony days, and indeed the fact that the bit of Philips’ business I was responsible for in my PR role was the consumer electronics arm.

By the time I returned to the UK, in 2016 and after 17 years abroad (and now working in telecommunications, another link to Dad’s professional origins), Dad's Alzheimer’s was already advanced, though he still had some degree of stubborn mobility. Osteoporosis, a side-effect of treatment for prostate cancer, had rendered him bent-double. We grew used to this figure appearing at door handle height, still getting himself up and down stairs, vainly refusing to use his Zimmer frame. That period always struck me as profound. His insistence on still propelling himself, as stubborn and even as stupid as it was, indicated his state of mind - decaying, it may have been, but he was still prepared to fight.

That fight ended last week, peacefully and painlessly, from what we can gather. To the end, Dad maintained his famous reserve, a quiet dignity. The lights may have been flickering, but the looks he’d give Mum, in particular, showed that his love for the woman was undiminished after the better part of seven decades together. It was hard, at the end, to know what he recognised or acknowledged, even with Mum sat beside his bed. She, for her part, has been brilliant. As painful as these last 12 months of separation have been, Mum has been stoic, accepting even. That doesn’t ease any pain of losing your husband, a week and a half short of 66 years of marriage - but I’d hope her knowing that Dad’s final days and hours were peaceful and in comfort would at least be of comfort to her.

They say you only appreciate how someone shaped your life after they’ve gone, but I’ve always known what Dad has instilled in me. Firstly, and perhaps foremost, a sense of humour. Actually, I get this equally from both parents (Mum’s remains robustly intact, I’m happy to report, despite her 89 years and various challenges to health and wellbeing of her own). Dad’s sense of humour came partly from the things he found funny. Even as the first signs of dementia were showing, he could still lose it watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon, or a Pink Panther film. Slapstick was clearly his thing, but thanks to his curation of tapes of old radio comedies like The Goon Show, Hancock’s Half Hour and The Navy Lark, and our gathering around the dinner table at 6.30 each weekday evening to listen to I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Just A Minute or some such comedy in Radio 4’s  ‘funny half hour’ before The Archers, I gained an appreciation for ‘the theatre of the mind’. Dad once took me to see Jacques Tati’s comic masterpiece Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, one Saturday afternoon. I would have been 13 or 14, so being dragged to see some black and white film featuring a French actor with little if any dialogue sounded like the absolute worst, uncool thing he could possibly take me to. I ended up loving that film, and still do.

There are many moments of mirth that I could recount here, but would take an entire book, not a blog post, to record. Indeed, in a life of 90 years, there’s so much about Dad that could be retold, largely to convey who he was, but also to provide therapeutic process. There’s no space for the holiday recollections, those annual visits to Devon and the gales of laughter that blew up the stairs from the living room below during that canasta tournament; being stuck outside the pub in Tolworth with a packet of crisps and a lemonade while he and my grandfather shared a beer; damp cottages in Cornwall and rain-soaked fortnights in Wales (yeah, while the rest of Britain turned brown in the drought of 1976).

Every family has such memories. It’s what’s called normality. The cruelty of Alzheimer’s is that Dad’s memories were washed away as the disease progressed, along with name recognition in the latter stages. And then the eyes grow hollow and you have no idea as to whether you’re a son or just a noise. Others’ experiences will, no doubt, differ.

Strangely, though, my dad’s incarceration over the last twelve months has been mostly without any heavy drama. I can’t speak for other family members, but even the sight of him in his wheelchair, parked up in the care home dining room like Operation Stack lorries on the M20, for enforced viewings of old black and white films, didn’t upset me as much as I thought it would. But twelve months is a long time. In recent weeks the contraction of various infections and illnesses, all symptoms of the body’s gradual disconnection from itself, moved him from unwilling participant in the Cuckoo’s Nest to being bed-ridden and struggling to communicate (or not at all) and slowly creeping up on Death’s Door.

Dad’s passing has been my first true experience of family bereavement, other departures not withstanding. You find coping mechanisms, the self-reassurance of saying to yourself “He’s comfortable” when, in truth, he probably wasn’t. And later, “He’s still got his dignity,” when the reality is somewhat less. But still you remain stoic. You know the worst is coming, but it’s just too convenient to recognise. And then you go and see Paul Carrack at the London Palladium, and he performs The Living Years, the Mike + The Mechanics song he leant his sublime, blue-eyed soul vocals too. And then you realise that you are tearing up. Properly moist. Beads of tears down the cheeks. The voice as wobbly as a resigning prime minister on the steps of 10 Downing Street. And you feel winded, not because you’ve involuntarily started crying in public in your 50s, but because reality just caught up with you like a mugger in a dark alley. But it’s a warning sign. A sign that you’re vulnerable to emotion, even if you’re rationalising things simply, it's still the sore throat heralding the full-blown bout of flu that is fully grieving. That is still to come.

Now, today, I’m still in a strange place. Perhaps due to being more mentally prepared for Dad’s death than I’d realised. And whether that’s a good thing or not, it has allowed me space to appreciate what a wonderful life Reginald John Poulter had in his 90 years, the fun and laughter we had as a family, the cool stuff we got to experience through his job, and the profound, enduring love he had for his wife, consciously or not, right up to the very end.

While going through his things, my brother found, in his wallet, three tiny photographs. One, of (we presume) a family gathering not long after Dad had met Mum; the second, one of my mum, brother and sister when the latter were still in single figures; and thirdly, one showing the infant me, together with Mum and my siblings. An enduring reminder of what we meant to him. And what he meant to us.

It’s a Thursday thing

Thursdays. Not quite Friday, but better than Wednesday and, thankfully, not Monday. In my childhood it was the day of Top Of The Pops and Cubs. In adulthood it is now chiefly known as the last day of the week in the office before the now-obligatory "working from home" Friday, a phenomenon so extreme that black cab drivers have stopped coming into London on the final workday due to a lack of business.

In the football world Thursdays have become a Championship day ranking behind the Premier League of Tuesdays and Wednesdays, a Lidl day, if you will, to two Waitrose days. OK, painful analogies, I know, but essentially, there is a clear gulf in class between the Champions League and the Europa League fixtures of a Thursday evening, arguably pound shop European football and an unnecessary distraction as clubs are forced to rearrange their domestic games to Sundays while still having to deal with travelling insane distances to get home. As a case in point, Chelsea's return flight from last night's opening Europa League tie against PAOK in Thessaloniki was delayed by weather, denying Maurizio Sarri's side rest and vital training before Sunday's visit to West Ham.

At some point this season Chelsea will have to visit Videoton, which isn’t a dodgy 80s David Cronenberg film starring Debbie Harry but, in fact, MOL Vidi FC, also known as Vidi, a Hungarian club based in Székesfehérvár. Wherever that is. Likewise, they will also have to visit BATE, better known as FC BATE Borisov, a Belarusian club from Barysaw. None of these - including last night's opponents, the Greek side PAOK - are glamour teams, or particularly glamourous locations with which to visit. Sorry, PAOK, Vidi and BATE, but face facts.

Elitist as it sounds, but when your European adventures have taken you to Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Paris and Munich in the 14 years since Roman Abramovich's largesse transformed Chelsea into proper European players, it's slightly galling to be in the Europa League. Fans know this. It's why, as Chelsea failed to finish last season in the Premier League's top four, home and opposition supporters willingly engaged in banter about Thursday evening social plans. Chelsea know that the "Thursday gig" lacks the appeal of the senior European fixtures on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, pricing tickets for the group-stage Europa fixtures at just £20 to drum up a crowd (which, thankfully, they will do, as mugs like me will be at Stamford Bridge on 4 October for the visit of Videoton, rather than at home throwing things at the TV because BT Sport have got Glenn Hoddle in the studio again).

Home games not withstanding, it's the away fixtures that provide the bigger challenge, both for the club and its supporters. None of Chelsea's group opponents are based in particularly easy-to-reach cities, so my hat goes off to those loyal followers who will take off two days from work and shell out a considerable amount of money booking flights and trains at a relatively late stage to go and watch 90 minutes of football in places where language, hostile home fans and provocative policing will make life less than comfortable. But that is the fun of following your club into Europe.

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

For Maurizio Sarri, the headache is one of making decisions on players. For last night's visit to Greece, Eden Hazard, David Luiz and Mateo Kovacic were left back in London, a deliberate choice to rest Hazard, in particular, ahead of this Sunday's Premier League game at the London Stadium. On paper, however, the line-up Sarri fielded against PAOK was pretty strong, with a fired-up Willian made captain for the night, and who subsequently put in a captain's performance, scoring the one goal that separated the sides. The Europa League is, for Chelsea and Sarri alike, an adjustment: "For an English team the Europa League is a very difficult competition," the Italian said after last night's game. "Because in Italy, if I play in Greece on Thursday I can ask to play on Monday night, but I have to play again in 63 hours, on Sunday morning." He's not sure how this will affect team selections in the future. "It is not a big problem now because we have played only six matches but in the future it may be a problem. I hope to qualify before the last one or two matches of the group stage.

One of Sarri's undoubted problems is and will continue to be striker Alvaro Morata who, despite a lot of creditable toil last night, wasted countless chances in front of goal. "Morata has to gain confidence with one, two or three goals," said Sarri. "I am not able to give him confidence. In this game he had three or four opportunities, he was unlucky. I hope in the future I can try to help him, but the confidence comes only with goals. But I have to say also that for the first time this season he was very ready in the box. He was on the ball, he was active."

Morata not withstanding, Chelsea's win at the Toumba Stadium yesterday evening meant that Sarri had recorded six wins out of his first six competitive games as Chelsea coach. He has a right to be pleased, but also to have concerns: "We were in control of the match for 90 minutes. We had a lot of opportunities, we missed them, so I am really happy with the three points and the performance but not the result, because when it is time to kill the match, we have to kill the match." That will have to determine team selection - and ensuring players remain fit. Unlike Sarri's predecessor, Antonio Conte, the latest Italian in the Chelsea dugout should have no complaints about squad depth. Last night he could even afford to leave Gary Cahill, with all his European competition experience, on the bench.

Picture: Chelsea FC

A tougher challenge will be deciding when to play and when to rest Hazard. Convincing him to stay at the club and not move to Real Madrid was, effectively, a brand new signing. The glee with which the Belgian skipped through Cardiff last Saturday, scoring a hat trick in the process, was a joy to behold. Tougher opposition awaits Chelsea in Europe after the group stage - which they should clear - is over, but by then the FA Cup and League Cup will, in theory, be providing further distraction. Conte made these commitments a further stick to attack the Chelsea board with, unnecessarily so. Sarri has selection challenges, but these are largely which, out of a talented squad, he can pick for their Thursday adventures to be fresh and ruthless enough to win games by more than the one-goal margin they recorded last night. Olivier Giroud must, surely, have earned his place as first-choice centre forward, but that surely can't mean that £70 million Morata becomes a standby option. Whatever confidence issues have hampered him since Christmas, meaning that an expensive resource has now been misfiring in consecutive seasons, needs to be addressed. It's time to sharpen up.

Down the tube - the history of rock and pop on TV

It's now just over 61 years since rock and roll - and therefore the beginnings of pop music - made its visual debut. Indeed, rock was still in its infancy when Elvis Presley exploded onto American TV, performing Heartbreak Hotel on CBS's Stage Show in January 1956. Of course, radio had already been established by then, and while video hardly killed the radio star as a result, Presley's hip-swinging, breakthrough appearance set in train a worldwide culture. Television gave a face and a body to the performers who would otherwise only be heard on radio, or pictured in the press or on record covers and, for those lucky enough, made accessible via the stage.

Bill Haley and The Comets predated Presley by performing Rock Around The Clock on The Ed Sullivan Show the previous summer, and some still say that was pop's Big Bang moment. But in the conventional, simplified sequence of musical history, it was Presley's arrival that begat The Beatles, and The Beatles who sparked the rock and pop explosion, which, running the course of the next 40-odd years, brings us to the present day.

One constant through most of this has been the evolution of television. In fact, you could argue that television has had as much of a symbiotic relationship with pop and rock as radio or any other outlet. That certainly is the impression one gets from Rock & Pop On British TV, the tremendous new book by Jeff Evans, which charts the history of music TV in the UK by going right back to the era of stuffy 'light entertainment', when music was anodyne, presenters wore dinner suits and ballgowns, and the teenager was robustly encouraged to be seen but not heard.

Published today - the 60th anniversary of the BBC's seminal Six-Five Special being broadcast for the first time - Rock & Pop On TV delivers a definitive appreciation of how music on British TV grew and has since receded, as well as providing a backdrop to social and cultural changes via shows like Ready Steady Go!, Top Of The Pops, The Old Grey Whistle Test, The Tube, The Word, The White Room and, latterly, the lone survivor - Jools Holland's Later....

While talking about the book at a recent Word In Your Ear Podcast recording, Evans raised the notion that anyone, of any musical generation, will have their 'moment' of music television - be it David Bowie's performance of Starman on TOTP (straining then-contemporary views on sexuality with his arm draped around Mick Ronson) or hoary old Dutch prog rockers Focus yodelling Hocus Pocus on Whistle Test, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax being banned by the BBC in January 1984 and then performed on the TOTP Christmas edition of the same year, right up to more recent times, and Seasick Steve's breakthrough, as a novelty item on the 2006 Hootenanny. We shouldn't forget, either, the moments of notoriety: Bob Geldof's expletive-laden rant during Live Aid, the painful live broadcast of The Brits in 1989 when it just didn't go right for Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox, and the ludicrous poking-with-a-stick of The Sex Pistols by Bill Grundy on Thames Television's Today show in 1976.

My own memories of music television are as vivid today as anything in my 49 years - be it Alvin Stardust and his somewhat creepy performances, leather jumpsuit-clad with a ring on top of a leather-gloved hand, or actually being a part of the TOTP studio audience as a teenager in the show's relentless, ra-ra skirted, balloon-fest sixth-form disco 1980s era.

Not surprisingly, Evans himself has his own poignant memories: "I do remember very clearly the moment when the UK was introduced to Meat Loaf, via the video shown on the Old Grey Whistle Test. That was what dominated conversation at school the next day. I should also point out that seeing Wizzard perform See My Baby Jive on Lift Off With Ayshea [ITV show which ran from 1969 to 1974] was the moment when I decided to start buying records. I was blown away by the fullness of the sound and the colour of the performance (Roy Wood in all his Technicolor glory and the rest of this huge band larking about behind). That said, some of my very earliest memories are of TV pop shows, because I had an older brother and sister. I don't remember any detail but I recall seeing programmes such as Thank Your Lucky Stars and Discs A Gogo at a very early age."

Without doubt, one show that spans the generations, still, is Top Of The Pops. Running from New Year's Day 1964 until July 2006, and recording weekly audiences in the tens of millions at its peak, it became a national institution which, says Evans, actually made it difficult to kill off. "It was struggling from the 1980s onwards," he says, "and not least because the music video, which had once seemed like a godsend for Top Of The Pops, because it was so handy for covering the absence of artists in the studio, was now available to every other television show. This meant that TOTP was no longer the only programme to cover the latest hits."

When TOTP began in 1964, from a cold, converted church in Manchester, pop was still an unknown beast. By the time it ended, the Internet had arrived, and pop, to some extent, had been and gone as televisual entertainment. "[TOTP] kept going until it really was no longer viable in the age when anyone could access music via the Internet at the press of a button," says Evans. "This longevity was probably due to the efforts of the various producers who were brought in to gee it up and keep it alive. The show was constantly being refreshed and changing its look so these were perhaps little kisses of life but eventually there was no way back. It might have lasted longer, given more goodwill by the BBC hierarchy and better scheduling, but probably not much longer."

Evans does argue, however, that perhaps we place too much significance on the role of shows like TOTP, despite it's perceived cultural importance, and that has some bearing on the absence, today, of the competition of music shows that existed in the '60s, '70s and '80s. "In truth, music shows have never generated huge audiences. TOTP was the one exception, with its viewing figures of around 20 million in the 1970s. This alone is disincentive enough for commercial channels but it also has a bearing at the BBC. It is not so hamstrung by audience figures but it still needs to get justifiable numbers for its programmes."

The arrival, in 1981, of MTV brought about another shift, though not immediately in the UK. Jeff says that this indirectly encouraged record companies to commission more videos which could then be shown across a broad range of entertainment shows. "Music shows then suffered as a result because they lost their USP. Increasingly, you saw broadcasters commissioning live performance shows as a contrast, or recordings of gigs and festivals, but even these have disappeared now."

Indeed, today television has lost its monopoly. "The general dearth of TV music programmes is also no doubt related to the fact that television is just one medium through which you can get your visual music fix these days," says Evans. The novelty of seeing a band 'in the flesh' has worn off in an era when poor quality smartphone footage of a gig is uploaded to YouTube within a matter of minutes of the house lights coming up. Or, worse, being streamed on Periscope.

"It's not just the easy access and the extent of availability, it's also the immediacy," Evans says. "If Rihanna has a new video out, fans are not going to wait a few days to see it on a regular weekly show. They will watch it straight away. In the same way, if there are still chart followers out there, they want the latest information there and then and not have to wait until later in the week for a run down."

Picture: Maidstone Studios

The one beacon in the dark is Holland's Later..., now in its 25th year and as a result, the second-longest music show on British TV after TOTP. "I think it [has lasted] because it is fairly timeless. Unlike Oh Boy!, Ready Steady Go!, The Tube and TFI Friday that flared brightly then burned themselves out, it has never been tied to one musical fad or era. With its broad cross-section of talent, it protects itself from the changing mood of the music buying public. Similarly, there are no gimmicks, which equally date a show. An intelligent editorial approach is also part of the success."

In mentioning Oh Boy!, Evans also raises memories of some of the more obscure pop shows that have come and gone. Who remembers All Systems Freeman!, a single-series 1968 platform for Alan 'Fluff' Freeman?  Or A Whole Scene Going, Rock Goes To College, Poparound (presented by Gary Crowley), Supersonic, and the legendary Cool For Cats, presented by future ITV wrestling commentator Kent Walton? One of the many joys of Evans' book is appreciating just how, for a good 40 years, music was everywhere on British TV - during kids' TV, Saturday mornings, Saturday evenings, weekday lunchtimes and weekday evenings. And it was spread across the channels, especially - and here's one for the teenagers - when television was exclusively terrestrial and, until 1982, comprised of just BBC1, BBC2, and ITV.

Even then, says Evans, there was an editorial difference between the BBC and ITV. "The BBC was still very Reithian [In the 1950s] in its approach to programming, including music programming," he says. "It wasn't just entertainment, it had to educate and inform at the same time, which was why Six-Five Special was no match for Oh Boy! once Jack Good had gone over to ABC. ABC allowed Jack to do his own thing and just go for pure fun."

As '60s beat pop gave way to more 'serious' music, as The Beatles concentrated on the studio and singles gave way to albums, the BBC tried to progress televised pop music with groovy shows like A Whole Scene Going, How It Is and Colour Me Pop. Says Jeff: "Thereafter, ITV always struggled to put together any sort of challenge to Top Of The Pops and Whistle Test, largely because it had problems networking shows. A lot of the music offerings were either designed for children - Granada shows like Lift Off and Get It Together, and therefore not available to the working adult, or they were made regionally and rarely made it beyond their own region, because they couldn't get into that important peak-hour networked period that was dominated by sitcoms, soaps, game shows and variety."

One significant entry in this canon, and which had a peculiar regional bent, was The Tube. Launched in Channel 4's first week, Malcolm Gerrie and his production team challenged the notion that major bands only appeared on TV shows in London, and successfully provided a breakthrough platform for a whole load of acts between 1982 and 1987 from Studio 5 at Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle.

As a fledgling journalist I was lucky enough to visit The Tube a couple of times - the first to interview Jools Holland on his return from suspension (after dropping the F-bomb in a live teatime promo...), and where I was also in a pindrop-silent control room for the world's first playout of U2’s With Or Without You video, heralding The Joshua Tree and the onset of the band as a global rock phenomenon. Gerrie invited me back six weeks later for the show's finale, after Channel 4 pulled the plug on the show after five series and 121 editions due to declining audiences (although the Holland incident didn't help). It was, nonetheless, a brilliant, brave show, providing a robust challenge to the light entertainment pop of Top Of The Pops, the earnest music journalism of Whistle Test and the emerging pervasiveness of the MTV format.

Today, though, apart from the ghoulish spectacles of the talent shows and somewhat incongruous live performances on The Andrew Marr Show or The One Show, fans of live music on TV must rely on Later...  and the annual Glastonbury visit for their fix. Notably, both are on the BBC, the result of the strong music editorial department run by Mark Cooper.

"I think there have been times when music programmes have been important to broadcasters," reflects Evans. "A good example is during the Beatle-inspired beat boom in the early '60s when pop was suddenly infiltrating all kinds of programmes from documentaries to soaps to kids' shows. Generally, because of the audience numbers, I don't think they have always been so important, however, although - of course - broadcasters have (in the past at least) needed to find a broad mix of programming, so music shows helped with that."

That repeats on BBC Four of vintage Top Of The Pops episodes generate huge - and often ironic - traffic on Twitter is a reflection of the unique shared TV experience of at least a two or three generations. "I'm sure TOTP has been missed," says Evans, "but probably only by some of its former audience, and in a nostalgic sense. I can't imagine today's teenagers, never having seen it except at Christmas, would consider it a huge miss, when they have so many options for accessing music. TOTP also belonged to an era when people watched television together. We had only three or four channels and there was no Internet. That collective experience – shared at a given time every week – has also gone."

A shame, perhaps, but for those who love music, and love seeing music, you could argue that the alternatives - the video streaming services in particular - do still do the job. But as Rock & Pop On British TV consistently reminds, there can never again be a first time for seeing The Beatles, or Bowie strumming his 12-string to Queen Bitch on Whistle Test, or Oasis making its snarling debut on The Word, and such events being the talk of the classroom the next day. Perhaps it doesn't matter, but for this music head, recalling the childhood joys of Sweet or Suzi Quatro or Slade, or finally 'getting' Britpop thanks to TFI Friday and Chris Evans' infectious zeitgeist consumption, there still is a place for an iconic 'appointment' music show on British TV today.