TOP OF THE POPS WAS CANCELLED 20 YEARS AGO. BUT IT’S STILL THE BBC’S MOST PROBLEMATIC SHOW
The Chemical Brothers, Travis and Five probably did not expect to be impacted by the fallout from the sacking of Scott Mills by the BBC. And yet, in a roundabout way, they have been.
The groups are among the artists who appeared on three Top of the Pops episodes presented by Mills in August 1999 that have quietly disappeared from BBC Four’s long-running Friday night repeat schedule. Mills only presented five editions of the music charts show – all in 1999, when he was 26 – and it appears to be unfortunate timing that the final three of those were slated to be re-aired just after he was being unceremoniously turfed out of W1A.
But the Mills situation is far from unique. Indeed, for a programme that ended its 42-year run in 2006, Top of the Pops has been a remarkably consistent source of headaches for the BBC in the subsequent two decades.
In April 2011, the corporation made much of the fact that it was going to re-broadcast Top of the Pops, week by week and in order, on BBC Four. The shows started from April 1976, 12 years after its debut, because that was when the BBC started keeping all tapes of the programme. It was when presenters like Jimmy Savile and Dave Lee Travis were in their pomp.
A little over a year after the reruns started came revelations of Savile’s sexual depravity and the arrest of Lee Travis, which led to programmes featuring them as presenters being dropped from schedules or having their contributions edited out. The excision of Savile, one of Britain’s worst and most notorious sex offenders, was thought to be complete, but the BBC was forced to apologise in 2014 when he was briefly shown in an episode of Top of the Pops 2 from 1971.
BBC editors and schedulers need to be on their toes when it comes to Top of the Pops, given its sprawling, rotating cast over decades.
Problematic presenters are not the only thing that has bedevilled BBC Four schedulers or Top of the Pops editors. There is an abundance of star performers who appeared on the show, only to later be outed, and in some cases jailed, for sexual impropriety.
Episodes featuring Gary Glitter (who has been in and out of prison for everything from downloading child sexual abuse material to attempted rape since the turn of the century), R Kelly (currently serving a 31-year jail sentence for child sexual abuse) and Sean “P Diddy” Combs (convicted of sex crimes last July) are being left to gather dust on the BBC’s shelves.
There was one notable exception to this pattern – Jonathan King, the former music mogul who in 2001 was jailed for historic sexual offences against 14- and 15-year-old boys. In 2011, six years after he was released from prison, he complained that he had been the victim of a “Stalinist revision approach to history” when his performance of his number nine hit, It Only Takes a Minute, was removed from an episode that originally aired in 1976.
King won an apology from Mark Thompson, the BBC’s former director-general, and in 2015, he appeared in a Top of the Pops re-run from 1980, demonstrating how a Rubik’s Cube worked.
It is understood that the BBC does not routinely remove output, but decisions about which episodes make it to air, or changes to performances that are broadcast, are made on a case-by-case basis. Which may explain why, for instance, Michael Jackson’s music videos have been shown in repeats, despite the late singer being accused of child molestation (he was acquitted of all 14 charges at a 2005 trial, but was posthumously accused of more wrongdoing in Leaving Neverland, a 2019 documentary).
And there are more prosaic reasons why whole episodes, or small segments, of Top of the Pops don’t make it on to the BBC Four schedule today. Mike Smith, who presented 69 episodes between 1982 and 1988, refused to sign a licensing agreement that would have allowed the BBC to repeat the shows he helmed before he died in 2014.
The following year, the BBC was criticised in some quarters for removing what many saw as a homophobic comment from Roger Daltrey when he introduced the Village People and told the audience to “watch your backs”.
Such tinkering can have the effect of disappointing people who see Top of the Pops as an artefact, or a portal to a distant time. “The brand is obviously tainted because of various associations and things that have come forward since then,” says Jeff Simpson, a former Top of the Pops producer and author of a 2002 history of the programme. “But it’s a shame, because the unfortunate aspects of the brand overshadow the huge value in the amazing content – what we now call content – that exists in that archive.”
He adds: “If they’re dropping whole shows, I think that’s a shame, because they can still reflect that era of music even if they want to airbrush out presenters, or certain aspects.”
If any music fans are disappointed about the Mills-fronted episodes being dropped from the BBC Four schedule and are desperate to get their fix of music from the summer of 1999, there is a workaround. The episodes are on YouTube, in full, on unofficial channels.
2026-04-10T06:00:58Z
