The ITV Chart Show Indie Chart
YouTube never ceases to amaze me. Randomly following up some links, I've stumbled upon what seems to be an archive of several years worth of the Chart Show Indie Chart.
British people of a certain age have fond memories of the ITV Chart Show, a weekly show consisting entirely of videos linked by the finest graphics that daytime television could afford in 1990, and adorned with fabulously uninformative "trivia" captions. But these were the days when almost nobody had MTV, so the Chart Show tried gamely to cover everything. This meant a weekly specialist chart, cycling between rock, dance and indie.
But the Chart Show aired after the Saturday morning kids TV shows, and the rest of the hour was standard pop music. And this was the dark days before Britpop, when British indie music meant people like Swervedriver and Chapterhouse. The resulting television was captivatingly incongruous. What other kids TV show would play the likes of the Drop Nineteens - let alone this?
Later years saw things get a bit more commercial, but it was still a weird intrusion into daytime TV - and therefore awesome.
You couldn't make the Chart Show these days - what's the point, when MTV Hits, VH1 and TMF are all perfectly happy to play the Top 40 in full several times a week? But at times, I miss the days when everything had to be crammed together into a single awkward bundle.
British people of a certain age have fond memories of the ITV Chart Show, a weekly show consisting entirely of videos linked by the finest graphics that daytime television could afford in 1990, and adorned with fabulously uninformative "trivia" captions. But these were the days when almost nobody had MTV, so the Chart Show tried gamely to cover everything. This meant a weekly specialist chart, cycling between rock, dance and indie.
But the Chart Show aired after the Saturday morning kids TV shows, and the rest of the hour was standard pop music. And this was the dark days before Britpop, when British indie music meant people like Swervedriver and Chapterhouse. The resulting television was captivatingly incongruous. What other kids TV show would play the likes of the Drop Nineteens - let alone this?
Later years saw things get a bit more commercial, but it was still a weird intrusion into daytime TV - and therefore awesome.
You couldn't make the Chart Show these days - what's the point, when MTV Hits, VH1 and TMF are all perfectly happy to play the Top 40 in full several times a week? But at times, I miss the days when everything had to be crammed together into a single awkward bundle.
posted by Paul O'Brien at 9:00 am
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