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Available for 8 days

The 4th of October 2025 marks seventy years since the iconic radio show Pick Of The Pops began on the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½. After seventeen years on the air, and now firmly bedded into its regular Sunday teatime, Pick Of The Pops with Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman was about to disappear, making way for a new kind of weekend chart show. His replacement was actor Tom Browne, but how could Tom possibly follow on from the man who’d become so synonymous with the countdown each week? In part two of this three-part series, presented by Mark Goodier, we hear how the nation became chart obsessives through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, with contributions from musicians including T’Pau’s Carol Decker, Jason Donovan, Kajagoogoo frontman Limahl, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and POTP superfans like Josh Widdecombe, all of whom confess to being ‘home tapers’ back in the day. Tom Browne’s Solid Gold 60 show was truncated into more of a crowd-pleasing sixty-minute Top 20 countdown at 6pm every Sunday during most of the Seventies, then it was the turn of Simon Bates, Tony Blackburn, Tommy Vance, Richard Skinner, and Bruno Brookes to have pop fans hovering over their ‘play’, ‘pause’ and ‘record’ buttons on their radio cassette decks as they tried to capture their favourite hits before the blokes started talking. There’s a chance to relive some of those great moments from the archives, including Tony’s infamous Duran Duran faux pas in 1981. And we explore how and why it was inevitable that Pick Of The Pops would make a return to the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ in the late ‘90s as a weekly nostalgia fest for those kids who are now their parents’ age when those charts were originally broadcast.