Top of the Pops ended in 2006, after a run of more than 40 years. Various professionals noted that the nerds who put stuff on the Wikipedia page didn’t get it entirely right, nor did any of the workers get a credit. I’m trying to get together as many stories as possible so that people can know how it was to be there week on and out, and not just the usual DJ’s and viewer figures stuff.

Most of my bit below appeared much earlier in these pages – this version was put together for Wikipedia from where it almost instantly vanished. They don’t want their nerdy world sullied by us….

I’m hoping – mostly in vain – that people will send me interesting stories about their days – ordinary days – on TOTP….

Here’s some to start with…..

I was a camera assistant on TOTP in the late sixties. We didn’t realise that what we were doing would someday be classed as history, so all there is in my diaries is “TOTP 0930-2230”, and no mention of the groups that featured each week, nor any stories of what happened on the day.

My job was to drive a Vinten Heron camera crane, see here –Heron . It moved by electical/hydraulic power with steering either on the rear or on all four wheels. A small catch was that if you were driving forward in four wheel steering and turned the wheel to the left, the machine went to the right. You couldn’t call yourself a real Heron driver unless you could do a figure 8 in four wheel steer. Another problem was that the two Herons assigned to the TOTP studio were early models with a small power lever, which was incredibly sensitive and would jerk away from rest at the slightest ham-fistedness. We had to drive these machines to an incredibly tight precision. I remember Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man where my cameraman started on a close-up of his eyes and zoomed out, from which I had to smoothly pick up a sideways track out to a long shot. Very very difficult, and live on BBC1 too. Later model Herons with pedal accelerators were sitting idle just up the road at Television Centre, but the powers that be wouldn’t swap them. I never knew why.

Here are a couple of stories from TOTP in the late sixties………..

When The Crazy World of Arthur Brown came in to TOTP to play “Fire”, it was done as a post recording, because Arthur wore a real fire crown. Someone had decided also that the studio would have smoke in the air (very unusual then), so they got a special effects fellow called Bertram in, who had probably been at Lime Grove in the Gaumont- Kalee days. He brought a large machine on fat wheels which was, in fact, labelled Gaumont- Kalee. It had a delivery tube a foot in diameter. Bertram tended this machine all day, to the amusement of the floor manager, who kept asking if he’d be ready. When the kids had all been chucked out, the moment came – the floor manager shouted “Now, Bertram” – and the tube belched an enormous amount of smoke, so much so that the Heron driver, me, couldn’t see the ground to see his marks, and neither could anyone else. Arthur’s crown was extinguished, and we all waited 20 minutes till we could see again. The clip that is still shown is take two, with much less smoke and a chastised Bertram.

One day during the live show, the Heron I was tracking, ground to a halt with 28 bars to get to the other end of the studio. I leapt off, and the crowd pushers helped me get the machine down the studio in time. Then we realised that the cable guard had jammed into the floor and taken a long gouge out of the lino. It stayed there for several weeks, and had a lead part in The Man in the Iron Mask, a Sunday afternoon serial. Eventually they re- laid the flooring, but not very well, and it bulged around the edges, making for some bumpy tracks. One night after the kids had gone, The Rolling Stones came in to play Jumping Jack Flash. During the recording the crew’s top Heron driver (me again!) spun the machine round, and completely ripped out the squares of badly laid lino. After that they had to take the studio out of service to do the job properly.

Bernie

Those mk1 Herons worked best using the “safety” platform (dead man’s switch if you like) as a speed control, with just feather light foot work, but you had to sit your weight on the bar seat (rather than lean on it) to do that. One just used the hand quadrant to change direction. This offended Vinten’s engineering sensitivities as the foot valve was cheap and cheerful (£30) on/off affair. The upside of the mk1 was that it would go much faster than mk2 but at the expense of robbing the crane arm of power This was later corrected for mk2 with a balancing system, as well as an expensive “proper” foot control but that made the whole thing relatively gutless. I think you might find that certain crews preferred the speed option for TOTP despite needing 3 hands to crane up and zoom at the same time (no foot pedals for cameramen on mk1) and so maybe your crew was “out-preferred” as far as Heron allocation was concerned!

Peter Fox

I was tracking Garth Tucker on the day Michael Hurll threw Phill Lynnot and Thin Lizzy off the show for getting back late from lunch. “Where are they?” “The’ve gone to get some new trousers” “What, down to wardrobe?” “No, down the King’s Road”

When they finally appeared,, they failed to start miming because, as usual (after lunch), there was no foldback when Mr Hurll cued the track. This happened twice, and on the third occasion, they started mucking about.

When Michael came down to remonstrate with them he was promptly accused of onanism. TOTPs continued to use “Yellow Pearl” as it’s theme tune, however.

Jeff Naylor