I don’t remember this record at all — a rather weird tribal-psychedelic remake of “Sugar Sugar” (by Jonathan King according to the internets) — but this is worth watching just for the TOTP audience which is jam packed with dancing dollies (some of whom we’ve seen before) and quite a few suave gentlemen too. It must have been cravat week.

The chart is a wonderful thing too, Perry Como and Andy Williams rubbing shoulders with T. Rex and Deep Purple.

My cockles need warming.

After the previous rather gloomy post I needed something a bit bonkers.

Did anyone ever know Jimmy Savile (apart from his mother)? Behind the hair, the cigar, the tracksuits, the jewelry, the charity work, and the colourful, now then now then public personality he was a peculiar old bird with perhaps some dark and dodgy corners and a lot of whispers about his private life. But I don’t want to go there because I have no idea and neither does anyone else either, for someone who was famous for so long he remains a bit of an enigma. But his place in British pop history is secure at least because he was there from the beginning on our televisions and radios and, like him or not, was the face presenting many of our happiest pop memories.

All the old TOTP presenters liked to have pretty young girls standing next to them but none more than Jimmy (who sometimes veered into dirty old man territory) and this must have taken some determined organizing.

PS: Don’t Frida and Agnetha look terrific in this?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the Top of The Pops studio.

Another one bites the dust: Pan’s People choreographer Flick Colby has died.

Maybe not one of the “greats” but someone who had a big impact on British pop culture and on every man in the country of a certain age. Even though the routines were sometimes a bit silly, Flick and the girls only had the time between the Tuesday when the new chart came out and the Thursday when TOTP was filmed to pick a song and work out a dance routine so they did a pretty great job considering. She probably didn’t need to work so hard though, most of us would have been happy to have watched them standing there opening tins of baked beans as long as they wiggled a little bit while they were doing it.

Before she went behind the scenes Flick was also a member of Pan’s People herself, she’s the blond wearing the orange hot pants in this routine (I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed typing the words “orange hot pants.”)