A love letter to ‘Top of the Pops 2’

Posted On October 5, 2025October 5, 2025

The BBC’s longtime music show, Top of the Pops, is one of the best examples of not knowing how lucky we all were until a great thing is gone.

It’s not just nostalgia. Being a child of the 1990s, I feel fortunate to have caught Top of the Pops while it still mattered, when Bad Man Bad’s drum and bass remix of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’—CCS’s instrumental budget version standing as the theme for much of the 1970s—heralded the arrival of the weekend every Friday night on BBC 1. A spark of lively debate in the household, the essential ritual wrapped around the all-important top 20 countdown, the family in union firing off firm affirmatives or scoffing negatives as each entry was called out before announcing the coveted number one that week.

It was perfect timing in its history, too. Too young to really remember its awkward identity crisis, the moment Auntie Beeb didn’t quite know how to handle the explosion of dance music, the series taken over by guys behind computers looking just as confused, my conscious pop awakening was spurred just as Britpop was reaching its cultural zenith, the next decade or so offering keen TV memories from Fat Les troop ‘aving a laugh and marauding from Eastenders’ Albert Square set to a stage takeover while chanting ‘Vindaloo’, witnessing Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ with zero idea of the pop sensation they’d become, and, for some reason, Babylon Zoo’s plastic alien camp miming the atrocious ‘Spaceman’.

It was a cultural institute that, for whatever reason, I miss. The last gasp of popular music’s unifying command, a collective moment yet to be cracked by the atomised fragmentations we find ourselves bewilderingly navigating. It’s easy to think the long-running music show was inevitably going to run its course in the streaming age, but the series’ executive producer, Chris Cowey, responsible for the show’s Silver Age, was never so fatalistic.

“…it could have been a show that, you know, really parked its tank on the lawn of what the music business is now,” Cowey confessed on the Heads on Sticks Chats podcast in 2023. “You know, the whole kind of digital revolution, Top of the Pops, could have, should have, would have been at the vanguard of that.”

He added, “People got a sense that the people that were curating it knew what they were doing and were on their side and cared about the music. And for me, that was the most important thing. And that’s a very, very delicate target to hit”.

What could have been. While the loss of Top of the Pops is rightly lamented, its archive plundering sibling is often overlooked. First launched in 1994 and broadcast on the, dare I say, more ‘alternative’ BBC 2, a eureka foil was had to make good use of the BBC’s deep musical vaults, dusting off select miming performances slapped with old Radio Caroline DJ Johnnie Walker’s narration on Top of the Pops 2. Like a VH1 for UK terrestrial TV, Top of the Pops 2 would prove to be a winner with the more misty-eyed viewership, as well as form an unwitting musical education for those paying attention.

I was such a kid. Alongside the informative gamut of music I was brought up on, everything from the giddy heights of Nirvana to M People’s low ebbs, and before Philip Dodd’s instrumental The Book of Rock tome I received from my Nan one Christmas, Top of the Pops 2 would be quietly planting musical seeds that I’d hold dear for the rest of my life. Far from suffering the archaic hits of my parents’ youth, Steve Wright’s animated voice over—the Roger Moore to Walker’s Sean Connery—still echoes with a weird authority in my psyche.

I was struck by so many lightning bolts. Depeche Mode’s industrial clangour hammering away behind ‘People Are People’—my childish ears pricking with kids show It’ll Never Work? having used the number as its theme—Roxy Music encapsulating the show’s glittering Golden Age, performing ‘Virginia Plain’s art-pop jamboree, gripped by ‘Golden Brown’s decadent waltz that shrouded The Stranglers, the world of synthpop unveiled by Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’, or Streetband’s novelty number entirely dedicated to toast.

To this day, certain songs first presented to me from Top of the Pops 2 still evoke in my mind the aesthetic of the clips the artists performed. Whether it’s the 1970s’ dodgy filters and effects or the 1980s’ thin mics and plentiful dry ice, certain tracks strike a weird nostalgia despite such hits well before my existence, transported to the family home and affixed to the TV screen, captivated by the gallery of pop’s pioneers and the occasional Jimmy Osmond horror show.

Top of the Pops 2 limped on as a semi-regular special following its older sibling’s axe in 2006, the last new episode being a 2017 Christmas edition, but you can still catch reruns on UKTV cable channels, as well as BBC 4, alongside the latter’s broadcasting of entire episode’s in full, a real wake-up call to just how bad any given day’s pop charts always is. But to anybody who grew up with the series, Top of the Pops 2 will trigger a sincere affection, and likely imbue many a nascent music fan toward a path of discovery away from the edges of the pop mainstream.

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