The world's longest running music show Top of the Pops is broadcast for the last time on BBC Two. The show had aired for 42 years.
Top of the Pops (TOTP) is a British music chart television programme, made by the BBC and originally broadcast weekly between 1 January 1964 and 30 July 2006. Top of the Pops was the world's longest-running weekly music show. For most of its history, it was broadcast on Thursday evenings on BBC One. Each show consisted of performances of some of the week's best-selling popular music records, usually excluding any tracks moving down the chart, including a rundown of that week's singles chart. This was originally the Top 20, though this varied throughout the show's history. The Official Charts Company states that "performing on the show was considered an honour, and it pulled in just about every major player".Dusty Springfield’s "I Only Want to Be with You" was the first song performed on TOTP, while the Rolling Stones were the first band to perform with "I Wanna Be Your Man". Snow Patrol were the last act to play live on the weekly show when they performed their single "Chasing Cars". Special editions were broadcast on Christmas Day (and usually, until 1984, a second edition a few days after Christmas), featuring some of the best-selling singles of the year and the Christmas number one. Although the weekly show was cancelled in 2006, the Christmas special has continued. End-of-year round-up editions have also been broadcast on BBC1 on or around New Year's Eve, albeit largely featuring the same acts and tracks as the Christmas Day shows. It also survives as Top of the Pops 2, which began in 1994 and features vintage performances from the Top of the Pops archives. Though TOTP2 ceased producing new episodes since 2017, repeats of older episodes are still shown.
The show has seen seminal performances over its history. The March 1971 TOTP appearance of T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan wearing glitter and satins as he performed "Hot Love" is often seen as the inception of glam rock, and David Bowie's performance of "Starman" inspired future musicians. In the 1990s, the show's format was sold to several foreign broadcasters in the form of a franchise package, and at one point various versions of the show were shown in more than 120 countries. Editions of the programme from 1976 onwards started being repeated on BBC Four in 2011 and are aired on most Friday evenings – as of January 2022 the repeat run has reached 1992. Episodes featuring disgraced presenters and artists such as Jonathan King, Jimmy Savile (who opened the show with its familiar slogan, 'It's Number One, it's Top of the Pops'), Dave Lee Travis, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter and R. Kelly are no longer repeated.