BBC One has made its long-trailered return to primetime music TV programming with Sounds Like Friday Night, a six-part youth-focused series fronted by Greg James and Dotty. As a short survey of the history of music television teaches us, it’s a bold but potentially bountiful move, provided appropriate observance is made of the various triumphs and follies of music TV programing past.
Prior to the invention of Bruce Springsteen’s denim-clad buttocks in 1984, and with it MTV, music television was mostly a quaint and innocent affair characterised by grainy black and white footage of Cilla Black appearing a bit unsure where the camera is, and some years later, The Old Grey Whistle Test. A show which, despite seemingly being made in a dimly lit cupboard and presented by a man, in ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, whose voice is the aural equivalent of chloroform, gave us a selection of classic live studio performances in the ’70s and ’80s – Talking Heads, David Bowie, Tom Petty, countless others – which, taken together, are basically an instructional video on how to be A Very Good Musician Indeed.
Then from the mid 1980s onwards, MTV and the music video rose to prominence, peaking in the late 1990s with some 5,327 spin-off MTV channels all simultaneously showing the same Britney Spears promo on a loop. Except VH1 Classic, which stubbornly continued to show Bruce Springsteen’s be-denimed backside on a loop.
Channel 4’s The Word – about the most On Drugs TV show of the 1990s, which in the age of Noel’s House Party is really saying something – welcomed waifs, strays and misfits and yielded era-defining early grunge and Britpop performances by Nirvana, Oasis and The Smashing Pumpkins against a trippy psychedelic backdrop. Its more respectable ’90s contemporary Later… With Jools Holland bafflingly endures even to this day, despite being apparently purposely scheduled in such a way as to be impossible to ever find. If you do catch it late of a Friday night, it’s only ever completely by chance, after waking up half-drunk on the sofa to be distressingly confronted by Jools playing boogie-woogie piano.