The one hundred and fifty-second TV show: #94 Top of the Pops
While originally a British show, Top of the Pops transcended borders and for some time some decades ago I watched the Dutch edition. It gave away the trick of the show quite quickly, as the show has an identical studio in each country it records in so they can share performances. For a Dutch boy, Wyclef Jean singing about '999' when the version played on Dutch radio used the American '911' was a dead giveaway.
This doesn't appear to have been as widespread as I thought, based on the lack of international editions in general, but it always stuck in my head as a bit of TV magic - the same sets everywhere with some editing magic did a lot of the heavy lifting there.
As to the show itself, while we are going to cover more of its genre in the future, this does feel like the ur-example of a show like it: several performers record a performance, a presenter links them and you get access to see these artists perform without having to get to a concert. It makes complete sense, especially in the time before music videos as a way to see these performances. At the same time, with the way technology has changed we don't need them when you can go on Youtube and see all of these performance, recorded legally or not.
We saw some random editions for this, thanks to BBC 4 repeats, but looking at that is just as much commenting on the music of the day as it is the show. The stages, after all, are what you'd expect from the day, abstract so it doesn't distract too much, while the show gives you the music I've discussed on plenty of other posts. The lack of adornment does it a big favour in that sense - not having to deal with other distractions means you just get a show that's as good as the music that contains it. The episodes we watched did still have the dance troupe performances, with Legs & Co in the episodes we saw. They make sense in the context of the show early on, since when a band can't or won't perform you still need to show something on TV, but these days the hastily created routines seem cheesy and unnecessary. As a show, though, this sets a template and I wonder how other shows like Soul Train will do following it.