Click through images to BBC iPlayer
What a super two hours on BBC4 on Friday: Ready Steady Go, the music show that ran at 6 p.m. on Fridays on ITV from August 1963 to December 1966: The Weekend Starts Here.
There was an hour of documentary clips and memories from director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, producer Vicki Wickham, and the likes of Paul Jones of Manfred Mann, Gerry The Pacemakers Marsden, Martha Reeves and Georgie Fame (whose music I always rated for its sophistication). Then a further hour of archive performances.
Many of the original videotapes were wiped, popular music being thought ephemeral, but enough survives along with colour film footage shot for a documentary. As you might expect, there was a bit too much emphasis on The Beatles and The Rolling Stones – it would have been nice to see more of the less well remembered acts – but we did get to see Dusty Springfield singing Dancing In The Street with Martha and the Vandellas (way better than the Supremes any day) and Otis Redding performing with Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe. Absolute magic. Some bits did look very dated, though, especially the mime competition.
Ready Steady Go was innovative and influential in the acts it booked – one of the first showcases for Tamla Motown on British television – and in the way it blended together with camera, audience, dancers and acts all mingling together. Many in the audience were Mods down from Sheffield’s King Mojo club.
I remember watching some of the programmes at the time: many at school thought it unmissable. For me it spanned those years from stamp collecting and trains to what was happening in the wider world.
I had to look up what happened to main presenters. The lovely and iconic Cathy McGowan is now around 77 but did not appear in the programmes. She was originally recruited to set off the smooth professional Keith Fordyce who died in 2011, aged 82.
The programmes are on BBC iPlayer until around 18th April, but knowing BBC4 they will probably be repeated ad infinitum.