Three days before this TOTP aired, a seismic event shook the UK. Bet Lynch left Coronation Street! Yes, after a solid run of 25 years on the soap, the character (played by Julie Goodyear) was finally leaving the show. She would return for a couple of guest appearances in 2002 and 2003 but her days as the landlady of the Rover’s Return came to an end on 16th October 1995. An iconic figure, she bestrode the cobbles of Weatherfield in her leopard skin print outfits and bleached blonde beehive hairdo with purpose and identity, one of life’s survivors. Not that I was watching Coronation Street back then. I think I’d long given up on it and so probably missed Bet’s grand departure. I think I must have been about to start watching Hollyoaks though with its first episode airing just four days after this TOTP. Anyway, I wonder if the influence of Bet Lynch can be spotted in any of the acts in this episode.

There’s no evidence of one of Coronation Street’s most memorable characters in this week’s hosts who are comedians Stewart Lee and Richard Herring again (they’d presented a show back in the May of this year as well). I can’t imagine that either of them even watched the soap at the time – it probably wouldn’t have aligned well with their brand of satirical humour. Lee’s hair here is quite the stand out. I recall those curtains-style haircuts being popular in the mid 90s but he seems to have taken it way beyond that with his hairstyle verging on Hasidic Judaism.

The first act tonight is Wildchild and whilst you may not remember the name, their hit will sound familiar not least because it was a hit three times over. Originally released in April 1995 under the title of “Legends Of The Dark Black Pt 2 (Renegade Master Mix)”, it peaked at No 34. Six months later, as was the way of dance records in this year, this version was released as simply “Renegade Master” when it topped out at No 11. In January 1998, the track was remixed by Fatboy Slim and was rereleased as “Renegade Master ‘98” and it peaked at No 3.

That’s the stats dealt with but what about the actual track? Was it any good? Well, you know me, I’m no dance head so I’m not best qualified to answer that question but watching this performance back, there didn’t seem to be much to it at all. Basically it’s just a couple of samples (“Eye Examination” by Del the Funky Homosapien for the riff and “One For The Trouble” by A.D.O.R. for the vocals)* worked up into a full blown track.

*Yes, obviously I had to look this up!

The person behind Warchild, whom I assume is the guy on stage here, was Roger McKenzie who tragically passed away just weeks after this performance from an undiagnosed heart condition. With such a dance oriented hit, the TOTP producers faced the recurring dilemma of how to showcase it. In this case, it was left to McKenzie to lead a dance troupe of four dressed in military fatigues in a heavily synchronised routine. Sort of reminiscent of Janet Jackson circa her “Rhythm Nation 1814” era.

By my reckoning this is the fourth TOTP appearance from Smokie for their sweary hit “Living Next Door To Alice (Who The F**k Is Alice?)” which seems extraordinary but then it did stay on the Top 40 for 14 weeks of which 8 were inside the Top 10. Thankfully, the merciful gods of the UK charts have seen fit to spare us mere mortals the horror of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown being on the show so it’s left to the studio audience to insert the ‘bleeps’. Conversely though, this makes the whole putrid nonsense seem even more bizarre with a group of middle aged men still clearly stuck squarely in their 70s heyday singing a song to a crowd of youngsters, who have no idea who they were or are, waiting to shout out “Alice? Who the bleep is Alice?!”. At least Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown’s objectionable presence clearly categorised the whole odious exercise as a novelty record. Without him there it was just downright weird. Deservedly, Smokie never had another UK Top 40 hit.

No sign of Bet in this next song though it is inspired by five fictional female characters or rather the aircraft they piloted. If anybody reading this was /is a fan of the Gerry Anderson show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons then you will be familiar with the Angels and their Angel Interceptors fighter planes. Code named Destiny, Symphony, Rhapsody, Melody and Harmony, they defended the Spectrum organisation’s airborne HQ Cloudbase from enemy attack. Thinking about it, how did Ash know about Captain Scarlet?! Wasn’t their debut album famously named “1977” after the year they were born in (and the year that the first Star Wars film came out)? So they were 18 in 1995? How did they know about a TV series that first aired in 1967? Remember, this was well before the internet was widely available and YouTube was yet to be invented. Well, Wikipedia tells me that the show was rebroadcast on BBC2 in 1993 following the success of the Thunderbirds repeats the year before so I’m guessing that would be how it came into the band’s cultural reference framework.

Whatever the origins of the song and how they came about, what couldn’t be denied was that “Angel Interceptor” was a worthy follow up to “Girl From Mars”. Cut from (roughly) the same cloth, it belts along at pace but doesn’t sacrifice melody to maintain that speed resulting in a pretty nifty tune. The video on the other hand doesn’t have much going for it. Apparently, the band themselves had major input into the promo but I don’t think I’d be owning up to that as it’s all pretty lacklustre stuff that lacks much in the way of a plot.

Finally we have arrived at the last knockings of the hit machine phenomenon that was 2 Unlimited. Well, almost. “Do What’s Good For Me” wasn’t strictly their last ever hit on these shores (there was one final single that clambered to No 38 in 1998) but it did usher in the end of their TOTP appearances. Hurray! / Boo! (delete as applicable). They’d had a good run though with their first time on the show going way back to 1991 with “Get Ready For This”. The hits flowed after that with a total of 14 UK chart entries of which only two failed to make the Top 20 with eight going Top 10 (including that No 1). I pretty much despised everything they ever did but I guess you have to give credit to a run of success like that.

“Do What’s Good For Me” was taken from the duo’s “Hits Unlimited” collection whose chart peak of No 27 gave more support to the idea that the game was up for Ray and Anita. After the hits dried up the pair left the project which continued with replacements recruited. Ray and Anita reunited in 2012 to perform live gigs but Anita departed for a second time in 2016 when she replaced by someone mysteriously called just Kim.

Another prolific 90s act now. East 17 had been having hits almost as long as 2 Unlimited with their first hit “House Of Love” entering the charts in 1992. Three years later they were on to their twelfth in “Thunder” which was the lead single from their third studio album “Up All Night”. So that’s three albums and twelve singles in three years – like I said, prolific. I’m sure that there was a special edition of the CD version of the album that had that frosted glass look which if you tilted it changed the image…

*Checks the Discogs website*

…Discogs describes it as ‘lenticular’ – sounds like a bone in the body or a particularly crap comedian stage name (Len Tickles Ya?). Anyway, “Thunder” continued the band’s obsession with weather themed singles – earlier in the year they’d released “Let It Rain”. This performance sees the four lads joined on stage with a guitarist, drummer and an unlikely second keyboard player supplementing Tony Mortimer (who has a keyboard of his own). Presumably the group wanted to beef up their sound? Or at least give the impression of beefing up their sound.

As for the song itself, it’s got a strong chorus I guess but the lyrics are dreadful – some nonsense about the thunder calling you from the mountain high and spreading your wings and flying.

And so to another band who once recorded a song about spreading your wings and flying. Surely Bet Lynch and Freddie Mercury were a match made in heaven (ahem) style wise? Well, it’s certainly true that she was the inspiration behind the look of Freddie’s drag persona in the video for Queen’s 1984 single “I Want To Break Free” in which the band all dressed up as Coronation Street characters.

After Freddie’s death in 1991 and his tribute concert the following year, the remaining band members returned to the studio in 1993 to work up the final vocal recordings Mercury had done in his last days into full blown songs. With not enough tracks to fill a whole album, it was decided to seek out non Queen songs that Freddie had either recorded as a solo artist or contributed vocals to. So we had “I Was Born To Love You and “Made In Heaven” from his “Mr. Bad Guy” album and this one, “Heaven For Everyone” which was originally released on Roger Taylor’s side project band The Cross’s 1988 album “Shove It”. When made available as a single, the track featured Taylor on lead vocals but the album incarnation has Freddie doing the honours and it’s that version that was given the Queen treatment for the band’s 1995 album “Made In Heaven”. Released as the lead single from it, “Heaven For Everyone” went to No 2, a clear statement that the public’s appetite for the band had yet to be satiated. If the single was a statement then the album was a full blown press conference broadcast simultaneously to the world with it going to No 1 globally and 4 x platinum in the UK alone.

To me though, the song was a fairly unremarkable ballad that doesn’t really have that famous Queen bravado but I guess as the first official single released from the band since Freddie’s death, it probably needed to be reflective in its sound and intent.

Having listened to The Cross version, it doesn’t deviate that much accept for some incongruous spoken word bits in the intro, middle and end which don’t really add anything to the track at all. Clearly the record buying public weren’t ready for a Roger Taylor offshoot project in 1988 and it duly peaked at No 84.

With their ex-band mate Louise still in the charts, Eternal announced that they had no intention of disappearing with a stand up R&B track called “Power Of A Woman” (Bet Lynch would have been proud). As the single to begin a new era for the band, it was strong and confident and its move away from a more pop sound seemed to play up to those rumours that the band had ditched Louise to guarantee more airplay on US R&B stations. In fact, listening to it now, it resembles what Mariah Carey was doing around this time who herself was trying to harness a more R&B flavour.

The band restructure hadn’t meant a change in roles though as the majority of the vocal heavy lifting is still done by Easther Bennett with her sister Vernie and Kéllé Bryan acting pretty much as backing singers. The album of the same name would also do well going double platinum in the UK though that was half the amount of copies sold by their debut “Always & Forever” meaning that you could say that a loss of 25% of band membership cost them 50% of their popularity.

Finally we get the biggest Bet Lynch influence of the show as Cher channels her inner Rover’s Return landlady to perform with platinum blonde hair. Having already had two No 1s earlier in the decade (albeit one being from a film and the other as part of a quartet on charity single “Love Can Build A Bridge”) and chalking up two No 1 albums in the 90s in “Love Hurts” and “Greatest Hits: 1965-1992”, this era of Cher was going pretty well.

However, her album “It’s A Man’s World” would prove to be a slight misstep. Sure, it made the Top 10 over here but it sold a tenth of those two previous albums whilst its lead single – a cover of Marc Cohn’s “Walking In Memphis” – seemed like a blatant attempt to court commercial success. It had only been a hit three years previously so it was still very much in the public consciousness. Not only that but it had been the subject of that controversial dance cover by Shut Up And Dance which brought the threat of legal action from Cohn. Presumably all that litigious behaviour had been resolved before this Cher release as one of the extra tracks on the CD format of the single was a remix by…yep…Shut Up And Dance. I recall thinking the whole Cher version was a cynical exercise in trying to secure a hit to promote the new album and although it certainly was – a No 11 as opposed to the No 22 peak of the original – it was very much seen as a commercial disappointment (including by Cher herself). She would more than make up for said disappointment three years later when her hit “Believe” would become the biggest selling single in the UK of 1998.

It’s the fourth and final week at No 1 for “Fairground” by Simply Red and we finally get that Blackpool Pleasure Beach video. However, the whole thing is cloaked in so much special effects that it seems to lose much of the identity of Blackpool to me. The album “Fairground” was taken from (“Life”) went straight to No 1 so the single did well to retain peak position given that its sales must have been affected by its release. Even so, I for one, am glad its reign at the top was coming to an end.

As for a tie in with Bet Lynch, well who could forget her involvement in this iconic storyline set in Blackpool?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Wildchild	Renegade Master	No
2	Smokie / Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown	Living Next Door To Alice (Who The F**k Is Alice?)	Of course not
3	Ash	Angel Interceptor	No but I have their Best Of album with it on
4	2 Unlimited	Do What’s Good For Me	Never
5	East 17	Thunder	Nope
6	Queen	Heaven For Everyone	Negative
7	Eternal	Power Of A Woman	Nah
8	Cher	Walking In Memphis	Not a chance
9	Simply Red	Fairground	I did not

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001x9f9/top-of-the-pops-19101995?seriesId=unsliced