The task in hand

It’s about 3am and I’ve been watching Top Of The Pops for roughly 16.5 hours. Having been blasted by pop pap, prog rock, cock rock, bad house and hip hop for the majority of my waking day, my mind has begun to do odd things.

I’ve made a rule that I can’t fast-forward or skip any of the acts presented on the 40 tapes I have of the BBC’s long running pop countdown, and I’ve become obsessed with the idea that I might have to endure Cliff Richard again (he’s already appeared three times… and on each occasion it made my brain want to crawl out of my nose and hurl itself at the ‘stop’ button on the VCR.)

I’m fractious and twitchy in my chair. Approaching the end of this foolish marathon, I consider myself lucky that I’m unlikely to be troubled by the Peter Pan Of Pop another time. And then it hits me: Cliff’s here already. He’s here in disguise. He’s on the 2004 programme I’m watching right now, and I’ll tell you how, it’s very simple: Cliff Richard has killed Ronan Keating, and is WEARING HIS SKIN.

There’s really no other human explanation for why, on a TOTP episode from 2004, Keating - a man some three years younger than me - is singing a song that Val Doonican would find “a bit tame”, of the standard soporific and undynamic genre we like to call ‘Cliff’, a song designed to provoke as little thought as humanly possible with its “Will This Do?” string section and factory key changes. Earlier in the day I reflect that Cliff’s music sounds as though he’s started a home keyboard running on the ‘soft rock ballad’ setting and hit the transpose button a couple of times, and now, suddenly, I’m listening to Keating and I’m hearing it again!

It’s a Cliffastrophe!

It’s Cliff/Off!

So, why am I doing this? Why make myself a guinea pig in this bizarre forced entertainment? Truth is, I dunno. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with pop music, adoring it for the fact that it’s an art form that truly allows the listener to impose their own emotional meaning onto any old crap; despising it for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Maybe I’m trying to get to know it better. Maybe, in spending 17 hours solid in the company of Peter Sarstedt, Olivia Newton John, N-Joi, Spandau Ballet and DJ fucking Sammy, I’m attempting a sort of journey, a journey of self-discovery into the cold, dark heart of pop.

Whatever, these are my rules: I choose, at random, an episode of TOTP from each year between 1968 and 2004 (the BBC didn’t actually record entire TOTP broadcasts until the late 60s.) I watch them in a single day, a constant stream of cheesy neon and formation dancing. I then document the process, like Aldous Huxley did when taking mescaline, or as a mountaineer might keep a diary of a treacherous ascent. So come with me now, won’t you? If, in the end, we’ve all done permanent damage to our nervous systems, or we have frostbite corroding our extremities, all for the greater glory of… er… whatever! ONWARDS!