Top of the Pops (TOTP) is a British music chart television programme, made by the BBC and broadcast weekly between 1 January 1964 and 30 July 2006. The programme was the world's longest-running weekly music show. For most of its history, it was broadcast on Thursday evenings on BBC One. Each show consisted of performances of some of the week's best-selling popular music records, usually excluding any tracks moving down the chart, including a rundown of that week's singles chart. This was originally the Top 20, though this varied throughout the show's history. The Top 30 was used from 1969, and the Top 40 from 1984.
William Edward Cotton was an English band leader and entertainer, one of the few whose orchestras survived the British dance band era. Cotton is now mainly remembered as a 1950s and 1960s radio and television personality, but his musical career had begun in the 1920s. In his younger years, Billy Cotton was also an amateur footballer for Brentford, an accomplished racing driver and the owner of a Gipsy Moth, which he piloted himself. His autobiography, I Did It My Way, was published in 1970, a year after his death.
Julian Miles Holland is an English pianist, bandleader, singer, composer and television presenter. He was an original member of the band Squeeze and has worked with many artists including Marc Almond, Joss Stone, Jayne County, Tom Jones, José Feliciano, Sting, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, George Harrison, David Gilmour, Ringo Starr, Bono, Rod Stewart and Ruby Turner.
Sir William Frederick Cotton was a British television producer and executive, and the son of dance band leader Billy Cotton. The television and radio presenter Fearne Cotton is related to him, as he was her paternal grandfather's cousin.
Russ Conway, DSM was an English popular music pianist and composer. Conway had 20 piano instrumentals in the UK Singles Chart between 1957 and 1963, including two number one hits.
Billy Taylor was an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator. He was the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, and from 1994 was the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Kathie Kay was a singer from Lincolnshire, known for her radio and television appearances in the Billy Cotton Band Show during the 1950s and 1960s. Her best known recordings are "We Will Make Love" and "A House With Love in It".
Edith Eleanor Bowman is a Scottish radio DJ and television presenter. She hosted Colin and Edith, weekday afternoons, weekend breakfast, and The Radio 1 Review on BBC Radio 1 until 2014 and has presented a variety of music-related television shows and music festivals. Since 2020, Bowman has hosted the annual Scottish Music Awards ceremony.
Nathaniel Charles Gonella was an English jazz trumpeter, bandleader, vocalist, and mellophonist. He founded the big band The Georgians, during the British dance band era.
Pebble Mill at One was a British television magazine programme that was broadcast live on weekdays at one o'clock on BBC1, from 2 October 1972 to 23 May 1986, and again from 14 October 1991 to 29 March 1996. It was transmitted from the Pebble Mill studios of BBC Birmingham, and uniquely was hosted from the centre's main foyer area, rather than a conventional television studio.
Sir Michael Parkinson was an English television presenter, broadcaster, journalist and author. He presented his television talk show Parkinson from 1971 to 1982 and from 1998 to 2007, as well as other talk shows and programmes both in the UK and abroad. He also worked in radio and was described by The Guardian as "the great British talkshow host".
Alan Louis Breeze was an English singer of the British dance band era and regular entertainer on the post-war BBC radio programme the Billy Cotton Band Show.
Nii-lante Augustus Kwamlah Quaye, known professionally as Cab Kaye, was an English jazz singer and pianist of Ghanaian descent. He combined blues, stride piano, and scat with his Ghanaian heritage.
Christmas Night with the Stars is a television show broadcast each Christmas night by the BBC from 1958 to 1972. The show was hosted each year by a leading star of BBC TV and featured specially-made short seasonal editions of the previous year's most successful BBC sitcoms and light entertainment programmes. Most of the variety segments no longer exist in accordance with the BBC's practice of discarding programmes at the time.
Fearne Wood is an English broadcaster and author. She began her career in the late 1990s as a children’s television presenter for GMTV, CITV and CBBC. She went on to present various television shows, including Top of the Pops (2004–2020), Love Island (2006), The Xtra Factor (2007), and Interior Design Masters (2019). Cotton was a regular co-presenter of the Children in Need annual telethons from 2005 to 2015, with the exception of 2009. From 2008 to 2018, she was a team captain on the ITV2 comedy panel show Celebrity Juice.
Variety Bandbox is a BBC Radio variety show transmitted initially in the General Forces Programme and then the Light Programme. Featuring a mixture of comic performances and music, the show helped to launch the careers of a number of leading British performers.
The BBC Radio Orchestra was a broadcasting orchestra based in London, maintained by the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1964 until 1991.
The BBC Scottish Radio Orchestra (SRO) was a light music broadcasting orchestra based in Glasgow, Scotland, maintained by the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1940 until disbandment in 1981.
Sydney Edmund Tolchard Evans was a British songwriter, composer, pianist and bandleader, whose works were popular from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Ivor Moreton and Dave Kaye were an English musical variety double act who were known for performing syncopated piano duets together from the 1930s to the 1950s. The duo consisted of pianists Ivor Arthur Moreton and David "Dave" Kaye, who had both been members of Harry Roy's dance band, the act developing from Roy's small group, the Tiger Ragamuffins. They played at two pianos, usually with Kaye carrying the melody, and Moreton embellishing it.
