Bring Back The Old Grey Whistle Test

X Factor may be over, but today (12th December), about now, the annual Christmas special of Top Of The Pops is being recorded.

The show, axed from the BBC in 2006 after 42 years, is set for a sixth consecutive Christmas Day revival.

As reported by Music Week last Friday, the line-up will include performances from Example, Pixie Lott, Rizzle Kicks, Ed Sheeran, The Wanted, Will Young, Professor Green feat. Emeli Sande, Olly Murs, Noah & The Whale, The Vaccines and X Factor winners Little Mix.

Now, regardless of what self-mutilation some of those artists may inspire you to carry out, it’s still a good pop line-up. A proper Top Of The Pops line-up that most probably has our dearly departed Jimmy grinning in his grave.

However, what would be great – and what I suspect the average music fan would like – is a show where The Vaccines and Noah & The Whale don’t feel like token guitar acts on an otherwise pure-pop line-up.

Of course, there is a show like that. It’s called Later… with Jools Holland. Sadly it’s a show with a weird and awkward atmosphere, where bands perform, occassionally after a stilted chat, with the audience behind them. It’s a show that tries to be all genres to all men, where Lou Reed & Metallica will be knocking about with Chic’s Nile Rodgers, or Al and Professor Green will be sat next to Cee Lo. Maybe they’ll even share a back-stage lemonade with Josh T. Pearson. Eclecticism is one thing, having an iTunes Library that’s as passive/aggressive as your average serial killer’s is another.

Furthermore, a whole genre is largely ignored. Mastodon‘s incongruous appearance (earlier this series, folks) aside, Jools doesn’t really “do” rock. It doesn’t fit with his suit-jackets and club-soda vibe, no matter how many letters we write begging him to add his honky-tonky noodling to the chillaxing grooves of Pulled Apart By Horses. (That reminds me, I need to get to the post office).

This is where The Old Grey Whistle Test comes in. The largely rock-music-orientated TV show, which ran from 1971–1987 on BBC2, wasn’t always live, and though it wasn’t always completely up to speed either (famously, it was slow to get on board with punk) it was a great, no frills place for more underground, grimy and alternative music. If your little sister watched TOTP, your older, fag-smoking brother, watched OGWT. Basically, what I’m saying, all-inclusive and right-on BBC programme-makers, is that we need more telly for late-teen smokers with insomnia.

What Old Grey Whistle Test did was allow bands to play whatever they liked – not to just push their latest single – and to perform freely. OK, it was ostensibly in an empty studio, but that didn’t matter, because there was an exciting sense that this was a window into a band’s practice room. It was them at their most natural and relaxed. When you watch it back, the lack of an audience, save for the skulking cameramen and clipboard-clutching producers, also gives a feeling of intimacy that invites you, idly, to daydream that the songs are being played just for you. Perhaps it’s because ‘Psycho Killer’ ends – appropriately enough – in a frenzy, but the final two minutes of this Talking Heads performance, from January 1978, is a great example of what made the show brilliant:

It’s 40 years since OGWT’s debut – the anniversary has been celebrated on Radio 2 this year by long-time presenter “Whispering” Bob Harris – and nearly 25 since its cancellation. Surely now, with the saturation of banal talent-telly rubbish and endless text-vote series-finales, it’s time to get some real music performed on our screens?

Please, Mr. BBC Man, bring it back the Old Grey Whistle Test, and keep the pop pap well out of it.