Top of the Pops

Top of the Pops is a long-running British music chart television programme shown each week on BBC One and now licensed for local versions around the world. Each programme consists of half an hour of performances of some of that week's best-selling popular music.

Send-ups

A number of peformers have sent up the format in various ways. Mainly this has been performers who disliked the mime format of the show (though presumably not enough to refuse to appear).

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• While performing their 1982 hit "Jackie Wilson Says" the band Dexy's Midnight Runners were seen performing in front of a projection of the darts player Jocky Wilson. This was a deliberate joke by the band and the production staff, but many people (including, apparently, host David Jensen) didn't realise this and thought it was a genuine mistake.
• In 1995 Oasis played their single "Roll With It" featuring singer Liam Gallagher pretending to play guitar, while guitarist Noel Gallagher pretended to mime, just to show how fake the 'live' performance was.
• For the 1984 Christmas Day edition all of the performers from Band Aid had been booked to appear apart from Bono. The performance of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" witnessed the unlikely scene of Paul Weller lip-syncing to Bono's vocals.
• In a 2005 performance of "Lyla", Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher made no secret of the fact that he was miming his lyrics by walking away from the microphone and chewing gum when he was supposed to be singing.
• Faith No More lead singer Mike Patton also showed he was obviously miming a performance by sticking his tongue out of the side of his mouth during closeup shots.
• In grunge band Nirvana's only performance on Top of the Pops, frontman Kurt Cobain "played" his guitar with his fingers inches away from the frets, drummer Dave Grohl danced around in his seat for most of the performance, and bassist Krist Novoselic waved his instrument around his head. For this performance Cobain was trusted to sing live vocals to a pre-recorded backing track: instead, he sang in a low, mournful wail; he was later to claim this was his attempt to sound like Morrissey. This performance has been taken to heart by Nirvana fans, who affectionately refer to it as "Teen Gothic".
• Singer Les Gray of Mud went on stage to perform with a ventriloquist dummy during the performance of Lonely this Christmas and had the dummy lip-synch to the voice-over in the middle of the song.