Bono sera: U2 perform on Top Of The Pops at the BBC Television Centre in 2004. Photo Dave Hogan/Getty Images.

On July 30, middle-aged Britons in the millions will gather in front of their televisions. It won’t be for football, nor will it be for Big Brother; that’s the good news. The bad news will come an hour later, after the final broadcast of Top of the Pops runs its credits. The demise of the U.K.’s first music-chart program after a 42-year run will bring porkpie hats to hearts. There will never be another water-cooler topic, another inter-generational talking point, like it — a venue for bands as disparate as Spandau Ballet and the Sex Pistols to play before an audience of 20 million (in the show’s heyday). More poignant is the sad irony that after decades of being desperately cool, Top of the Pops had become desperately unfashionable.

From its maiden broadcast on New Year’s Day, 1964, TOTP — as it came to be known — was must-see TV. It reflected the week’s hit parade in Britain, which, at the time of the show’s debut, was dominated for the first time in pop history by British acts rather than Americans. Who could argue with the lineup on that first night: the Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard, Dusty Springfield, the Dave Clark Five and, on a film screen over the stage, the Beatles. Subsequent episodes offered more of the same: Jimi Hendrix, the Animals, the Hollies. In those days, TOTP gave viewers their first opportunity to see what a band looked like after its single hit the radio (you can imagine the stir Alice Cooper might have caused). Thursday nights — the show’s longest-running time slot — became a cathartic experience, rousing passion, exhilaration, outrage. You may not have cared to discuss the dodgy politics of the time, but everybody had an opinion on new music.

Throughout the show’s run, many of the performers lip-synched. The producers figured viewers would want the hits to sound exactly like they did on radio. Even so, the show had an anarchic unpredictability that later acts like the Sex Pistols would come to exploit. Like no “live” program today, there were gaffes, there was chaos. Both the bands and the show’s producers pretty much made it up as they went along. As Keith Richards recalled about the Stones’ first appearance: “The crew were all there, tripping over each other. It was a great ramshackle event… Everybody was kind of feeling their way.”

But since the growth of music television in the early ’90s, and the advent of MP3s more recently, TOTP became largely irrelevant, so that, as British television critic Mark Lawson said recently, “It became not only the last place fans would see [bands] but the last place they wanted to.” As a result of its dwindling viewership, in November 2004 the show was moved from its prime Thursday slot on BBC 1 to Sunday night on BBC 2.

For its fans, TOTP fell far and fell hard. In the ’60s and ’70s, when Thursday night came around, parents and their children would install themselves on the sofa in anticipation of genuine fun for the whole family.

You name it, they've danced to it: The dance troupe Pan's People, a regular feature on Top Of The Pops. Photo Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

“My family would all sit down together and shout ‘Good!’ or ‘Rubbish!’ at the acts on the telly,” says Jeff Simpson, author of It’s Still Number One: Top of the Pops 1964-2002 and a former backstage reporter for the show. “Back then, it was all about the family. Mum would be checking out the outfits, dads would be watching the dancing girls” — Simpson is referring to Pan’s People, the leotard-clad troupe that performed choreographed interpretations of chart hits when the band couldn’t make it to the studio — “and the kids would be waiting for something edgy to come on.”

But in the music biz, that was eons ago, when there were only three channels on British television and the series was broadcast from Manchester, heart of the rock ’n’ roll scene, where the long-haired and leather-clad could queue up out of smelling distance of the BBC establishment in London. Even through the ’80s — when Madonna was grassroots, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood snuck in a four-letter word and Madness got stuck in the elevator and missed their cue — TOTP had no real rival.

“Probably every subsequent music show took something from TOTP,” says Terry Staunton, a former New Musical Express journalist and contributor to Record Collector magazine, “but seeing as the BBC owned the rights to the official charts, no other program could set itself up as a direct competitor.” (There was a short-lived American version of TOTP, but it had none of the prestige of the original.)

“There was a fantastic buzz around the whole thing,” says Janice Long, the show’s first female host, whose tenure ended in 1988. “People would have sold their soul for a ticket while I was there.” Then, as they say in Blighty, it all went pear-shaped. The bands started selling their souls. Producers got old. Britpop went through a dark period. Lip-synching lost its kitsch appeal. Cliff Richard was hauled out for the 150th time. And in a statement two months ago, the BBC announced TOTP could no longer compete with the 24-hour music channels.

TOTP was destroyed by an economy of plenty. In the early ’80s, bands began promoting their videos on new commercial channels before they hit the charts. By the time the acts made it to TOTP, kids would have already figured out that the Thompson Twins were three and not two. The anticipation of a band’s “national debut,” which TOTP had always promised, disappeared. Unless it was a group like Duran Duran, known for its members’ constantly evolving hair colour, what was the point of tuning in to see them yet again? The show’s faithful audience became increasingly fractured. And then, in the ’90s, came the internet.

This much is true: Spandau Ballet's Steve Norman and Martin Kemp backstage at Top of the Pops in the mid '80s. Photo Graham Wiltshire/Getty Images.

“Younger music fans are used to an industry which is geared towards the visual,” says Staunton. “Almost every single has an accompanying video and there’s a glut of 24-hour music channels, but pop kids of the ’70s and early ’80s were pretty much starved of access.”

“Viewing patterns have changed dramatically,” says Simpson. “Most kids now have a TV and a computer in the bedroom. There’s MySpace and YouTube. I’m afraid the loss of Top of the Pops won’t have an instant effect on them.” For bands, the relationship was more confused.

“It was a watershed in an artist’s life to be on,” says Simpson. “Noel Gallagher once said to me that he had a sequence of ambition laid out. It started with ‘record deal,’ then ‘album’ and finally, ‘appearance on Top of the Pops.’ The show was a stepping stone for him. Going on Top of the Pops was a sign that you’ve crossed over. And most bands feel that is their ambition.” The only bands that didn’t recognize the show as a crucial element in their career trajectory were punks like the Clash in the ’70s — for whom an appearance on TV would have been a crime against their ethos — and, in the mid-’90s, electronic artists like Fat Boy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, who didn’t have much of an act to perform.

Terry Staunton recounts a conversation he had recently with Chris Difford of the band Squeeze, which made its debut on the show in 1978 with the single Take Me I’m Yours: “He said that, up until the day the BBC sent a Rolls-Royce to pick him up from his home, his mum had always been unimpressed by anything he’d done. But that day, she became their biggest fan. He said that TOTP was the yardstick that helped parents equate what success was.”

Staunton points to bands like the Arctic Monkeys, who debuted on MySpace last year and rode the internet buzz to No. 1 in the British charts, without ever appearing on Top of the Pops. “Now the show is just one of the many hoops an artist jumps through in just one day out of a heavy promotional schedule,” says Staunton. “It’s just not that special anymore. I used to watch it religiously, but I haven’t for 20 years.”

Fans are likely anticipating the final program in a way that they haven’t since long hair was for girls and Status Quo was everything but. Will Justin Timberlake show up in a dolphin suit and play guitar for the Flaming Lips, like he did in 2003? Will the audience rush the stage, like they did for Nirvana in 1991? Will everyone party like it’s 1999, like they did in 1983? One of the joys of TOTP was that you never could tell what would go down. Except when it was cancelled. Everybody predicted that.

Ellen Himelfarb is a Canadian journalist living in London.

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