About BBC TOTP Online

It's the year 2000. If you believe everything you hear in pop songs, Prince has got a hangover and Jarvis Cocker is moaning about time-keeping. By now, we all thought we'd be eating space food and taking regular trips to the moon. But apart from Geri Halliwell, we've all got our feet firmly on Planet Earth.

By now, there are 23 homes in the UK that have one of those new-fangled interwebnet connections and the number is multiplying at an alarming rate. Mainly because we can't do our sums. But thankfully, some of you out there are clever enough to hunt out the brand new Top of the Pops website. When we showed it to the TV show's Executive Producer of the time, Chris Cowey, he slapped us on the shoulders proudly, and said "it's a bit small". Happy days...

2001, a pop odyssey! How fondly we remember the days of Top of the Pops Plus on a Sunday morning. Perfect TV fodder for those of us who danced just a little too much the night before.

Meanwhile, the main show moved from Elstree to a temporary home in Riverside Studios before settling back at Television Centre in the Autumn. They even let the web team moved out of our broom cupboard in Central London to a post-war prefab over the tube tracks. It's no fun making a website when you have to hold down everything movable every 2 minutes as a train goes past. But somehow, we managed it.

Of course, the most exciting thing to happen this year was the launch of the TOTP2 website. Never a dull moment when you've got the likes of Bucks Fizz and Human League on the blower, begging for an interview. We even got to flirt outrageously with the ladies from Legs & Co.

But for those of you thinking "who?" to all of that, let's have a look at what was happening in the charts during 2002. 

Skip forward to 2003 and the first radical redesign for the Top of the Pops website. We also introduced tons of new features, games and other goodies which saw us hitting a record high of 3 million hits a week! Late 2003 also saw another new TOTP logo introduced, with the site getting another minor tweak later on to accomodate this.

As Chris Cowey left the building Andi Peters took over as the new executive producer of TOTP in the Autumn of 2003. In November 2003, TOTP tried a last attempt to revive dwindling TV viewing figures, changing the look and feel of the show completely. Of course, with this meant a new TOTP logo, and another proper online refresh for the Top of the Pops website.

The TOTP Online team updated the website again, to what would be it's final visual overhaul. During 2005, the TV show moved to BBC2, and TV audience numbers started to drop further.

After numerous attempts to revive the audience figures, TOTP was finally cancelled in July 2006. The days for TOTP Online were numbered, or were they... In a surprise move, the BBC kept the TOTP website updated for some time, updating it infrequently with pop and chart news. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually the inevitable happened a year later.

After less than a year of so of TOTP broadcasting the BBC did the inevitable, and shut down TOTP Online, in favour of the Radio 1 Chart Blog. The BBC officially "mothballed" the site in 2007. To this day, the website remains partially viewable. But as web standards evolve, and as the BBC slowly upgrades their technology, certain parts of the website have permentantely been lost. In order to preserve Top of the Pops, and carry the TOTP banner for future generations, we now show some of the archive content on our website.