Dave Lee Travis

One of my Facebook groups recently put up a post of what looked like an old newspaper – yellowed, crumpled and a headline about miming on Top Of The Pops.

Turns out it was dated January 4, 2015. Yes, this January we’re living in now.

Forgive me for being churlish, but the headline TOTP: THE MIME HAS COME didn’t fill me with joy.

Top Of The Pops is a spent force whose audiences slumped from a peak of 19 million to a low of barely one million by 2005. It was cancelled a year later.

It was also a horrible programme to be on.

But first, the audience. And also, why the programme’s not worth resuscitating.

Audience problems started when Matthew Bannister took over as Controller at Radio One. The station was peopled with the big beasts of pop radio – Dave Lee Travis, Simon Bates, Johnnie Walker, Alan Freeman, Steve Wright.

They were not, as Bannister noted, in the first flush of youth. But they were attracting audiences of 16m+.

From the 60s on, mainstream pop was exactly what it said on the tin: mainstream. Records sold in their millions. You frequently had to sell half a million in a week to hit the top spot.

So you, your mum and dad, and quite likely your Gran and Granddad were watching Top Of The Pops. And many of them were also listening to Radio One.

And that presented a problem in Matthew Bannister’s world. The BBC has an almost pyschotic attachment to the notion that R1 is for 13-24 year olds. Thirty is pushing it. R2 is aimed at 35 upwards. As you move through the age range, their belief is some of you will start also listening to R4 in your 40s and 50s.

But people don’t behave so predictably, particularly generations X and Y.

Anyway, Bannister programmed to get rid of the oldies. Mainstream – out. Genre – in.

He was right about one thing. Not many of us wanted to listen to rap. Or hip hop. Or grime. Or house. Or drum’n’bass.

The unintended consequence of his policy was that as fewer people listened, so he narrowed the audience, and thus he narrowed the market for record buyers. Pretty soon, there was no mainstream.

And there was a further unintended consequence of his unintended consequence. As the pop market split into sub genres of specialist tastes and the mainstream drained away, Top Of The Pops – which wasn’t even his remit – found itself booking artists who had sold 10,000 records in the week.

Now, it’s not rocket science, is it, that many records selling hundreds of thousands of copies in a week = a programme that many millions will watch.

Whereas, a bunch of one hit wonders selling a few thousand copies in niche markets = not much of an audience.

Coincidentally, at the same time in America, FM Radio – another genre medium – was knocking AM Radio out of the ballpark. AM was mainstream radio, and stations throughout the country played much of the same music, creating enormous selling megahits.

In the following period, the music market became even more fractured by genres and sub-genres. Music sales have slumped from $30bn in 1998 to less than half of that today.

Does that sound like a recipe for an exciting return of a programme that had already outlived its usefulness?

Plus the miming. What a joke. This was the Top Of The Pops scam. They pretended everyone was playing live. You had to go back into the studio (at your own cost) the night before filming, and re-record especially for the show, and put on a new vocal.

To make sure you did this, they’d send a Musicians’ Union rep down to the studio to watch you do it. Except they didn’t. They were easily distracted by pluggers and record company types. So you’d go through the motions, do a quick desk mix from the master, and off they’d go with their ‘live’ track for next day’s recording.

The next shock was getting to the studio the next day. I turned up with my full band – all of us fully paid-up MU members, and certainly (me excepted) exceptional players, ready to do their stuff.

Time for run through. I strap on my guitar and get ready to sing to the track. A very cross man in a very cross shirt strode across the studio in his horribly cross trousers saying, “No, no, no, that’s not what we’re doing”.

He didn’t even introduce himself. He just told me they were setting up a ‘controller’s desk’ with phone and other props and I would do the talking bit live in the studio.

I say live. They wanted me to mime.

I’m sorry – you want me to mime to a spoken part while a bunch of pubescent girls pretend to dance around in front of me?

Yes. He did.

And what about the singing bits? “When the show’s over, you’ll stay behind” (what is this? Fucking school?) “and we’ll bring in a car and shoot you through the screen”. Isn’t that going to look a bit odd – where will the microphone be? “We don’t want you to sing it. We want you to mime”. Oh dear God.

I watched all day as they treated everyone like cattle. It was appalling. Old hands like The Shadows were used to it. But there were several of us newcomers for whom this day was supposed to be a dream come true. The BBC staff were officious, apparently power mad, no interest in music, and certainly no interest in what a prat I was going to look.

Furious, I phoned my record company boss and said I didn’t want to do it. “Well Paul,” he said, in a very reasonable voice, “that’s entirely your choice. And I sympathise. I really do.

“But let me just put this thought in your head: at the moment, you’re selling 5,000 copies a day. Once this show goes out, you’ll be selling 20,000 a day.”

It didn’t take me long to figure out that 20,000 copies a day over a six-day week meant I would be Number One next week. So I went ahead, made a prat of myself.

Most of you know how this story ends. Yes, we got orders for 20,000 a day. 120,000 in the week. Only the record company got stuck in the queue at the pressing plant. So instead of going to Number One, I dropped down to Number 11.

And don’t get smart and tell me there’s two number ones in 11.

I couldn’t give a toss for Top Of The Pops coming back. It looked good when you watched it, when everyone on it was selling bucketloads of singles.

But when you were on it, it was disgusting.

And it didn’t look so good when no-one on it was selling worth a bean. And then everybody stopped watching.

Leave it where it is. Don’t embarrass yourself.

I did want to show you my most memorable clip from the show, but I can’t find it. When Cyndi Lauper went on to do Girls Just Want To Have Fun my memory is of her running around the whole studio, then climbing up scaffolding. The cameramen seemed to have no clue and were just trying to keep up with her. Still, here’s another clip of her giving Tom Jones a bit of a seeing to. Video’s crap, but you can feel her extraordinary energy. When I saw this on its first broadcast, you could see the surprise on Tom’s face as she matched him phrase for phrase. The performance starts about 1m 30s in.

Paul Gambaccini sits at home, his diligently structured 40-year broadcasting career in tatters – a career built on hard work, intelligence, deep knowledge, a carefully cultivated public persona, and a courteous manner in private that never seems to flag.

Eleven months on bail, and no charge brought.

Did we even know that was possible? Are we not shocked that it’s legal?

This is Operation Yewtree at work, in which police and prosecution services seem to have dispensed with some of the hardest-won and longest established tenets of British justice.

I launched this blog at the beginning of 2014, just as BBC4 started running repeats of Top Of The Pops from 1979, including my own appearances.

Since then, many editions of the repeats have been cancelled because they were hosted by presenters who have come under Yewtree’s magnifying glass. More will be cancelled in the coming years – or else they’ll be edited to remove the guilty (or even the arrested-but-not-charged).

I’m not here to talk about the hateful crimes of Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris. Good riddance to them, and God bless and help their victims.

What I am saying is: surely our police and prosecution services might have foreseen that the public would discern a difference between heinous paedophiles and rapists, and groping pillocks like Dave Lee Travis?

More to the point, they might have realised that the public would be seriously perturbed at the effect on the lives of those the police haven’t even charged. When do you think we will next hear from Cliff Richard?

But neither the police or the media seem to pay much attention to public feeling. To this extent, they appear to be acting more akin to Cotton Mather (the Salem Witches) than William Blackstone (Fundamental Laws of England).

The Facebook group Popscene has over 350 members. A significant portion, maybe half of them, are female. Throughout Yewtree, I haven’t seen a contribution from anyone, let alone a female, that says, regarding sexist gropers being prosecuted, “About time too”.

The thing that binds Popscene, apart from a love of pop music, is that many members are of a certain age. So a lot of these women have been through the era when, we are told, female employees were routinely assaulted and too afraid to do anything about it.

And yet Popscene women appear furious at Yewtree’s tactics in publicly outing those they are ‘investigating’, whether they charge them or not.

Jimmy Tarbuck, Jim Davidson and Freddie Starr are just three of those arrested, given maximum publicity, and released without charge. Others – no use to the police for publicity, so not named – have also been arrested and released without charge.

But they did manage to charge Travis with 12 offences. Unfortunately for them, after two trials, only one of the charges stuck, and then only for a short suspended sentence. Which tells you something about how the rules of evidence are being degraded.

I’m not saying what Travis did was excusable.

Also, just so you know, I never liked the man. That’s just me. Doesn’t matter why. It’s personal.

But still, imagine yourself in court, and the Crown’s QC is telling the jury: “It’s not for you to judge degrees of guilty.

“Don’t ask why we are trying something that could have been dealt with by a slap in the face.”

Really? We’re not allowed to ask that?

It doesn’t matter, she said, that the allegations “are not the most serious that courts have to deal with. ‘Is it serious enough?’ is not a question you have to worry about.”

Wow. I would have thought that was partly what juries were for – to tell the Courts at the very least when they are overstepping the bounds of common sense.

All of this has resulted in a spate of reminiscences and newspaper stories of ‘inappropriate’ (God, I hate that word) behaviour. Some of these stories are of events that happened less than 20 years ago. In the 1990s, The Spice Girls led us to believe that girl power had taken over, and that women knew how to deal with sexists like Travis.

But it seems not. Janet Street Porter recently told the story of a female editor of a 1990s television programme. The editor’s star presenter routinely presented himself ‘stark naked in the bath’ for daily meetings in his dressing room.

Complaining that you allowed yourself to be subjected to this indignity every day, day after day – isn’t that just whingeing?

I’ve spent a week trying to frame this blog in the least controversial manner. But it’s an almost impossible task. You’re reading my 53rd draft, and still I know it will offend. Because – all special pleading aside: we are a victim if we say we’re a victim – this is not how we conduct justice.

So let’s make it personal for a second. At the age of fourteen I told a fully mature 6′ 4” man – father of two toddlers I had just babysat – that, no, I didn’t want him masturbating me while I took a bath. Surely by the 1990s a grown woman could take personal responsibility for telling a grown man they should meet in an office, rather than in his bath?

In the Sunday Times this week, Camilla Long recounts her 2012 interview with Dave Lee Travis.

In 2012 she reported “I don’t think there was a part of my body he didn’t grope”.

In 2014 she reports that she “left the interview feeling like a non-person, odd and dirty and used”.

Is it just because I’m male that I find it difficult to understand why she didn’t say that first time around?

After all, Camilla Long is no shrinking violet. She is caustic and controversial. Last year she won the Hatchet Job Of The Year award for her review of the book Aftermath. She described author Rachel Cusk as “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish”, who “describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail”.

So this is where we’ve got to, 45 years after Germaine Greer’s watershed work. A tough, professional woman, willing in print to attack a ‘sister’, but afraid to slap an ageing dj or knee him in the balls, or even just tell him to fuck off, despite the fact his wife and a photographer were in the vicinity. She put up with Travis’s behaviour for 90 minutes, she says. Why?

My mother and my grandmother, feminists before the word gained currency, would have wanted a word with Camilla. They’d have also wanted ‘a word’ with DLT. He would have regretted it.

No music this week. It seems, erm…..inappropriate.

Instead, here’s a clip of Morgan Freeman, around the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death, suggesting we stop talking about racism. I’m wondering if there is a woman out there, in the 45th anniversary year of The Female Eunuch, brave enough to address the discussion of sexism with a similar breath of fresh air.

Meanwhile, I’d like my 1970s back, please. But maybe that’s too much to ask. Or too trivial……

DRIVER 67

Top Of The Pops: Power Mad and Irrelevant

Yewtree, DLT, Gambaccini and me