A Tube ticket. Photograph: the CerysmaticFactory website.
These things I remember about Channel 4's groundbreaking TV show the Tube, in it's 80s heyday...
The queue of kids waiting outside the TV studios at teatime, wanting to get in. Presenter Paula Yates's gravity-defying hairdos, and unfeasibly tight cocktail dresses. Muriel Gray, the Scottish co-presenter and fellow peroxide bombshell's unfeasibly high-pitched voice, razorblade humour and punk chic. Loads of bands, from the ridiculously famous (Eurythmics, U2) to the ultra-cool and barely remembered (Swansway). Some of the most ludicrous hairstyles ever sported by mankind: particularly the back-combed horrors aloft of the Alarm, whose singer Mike Peters had clearly been rendered cross-eyed by successive use of hairspray. Frankie Goes to Hollywood writhing around in fetish clothing. Presenter Jools Holland wearing a grin as wide as his lapels as he addressed the audience as "You groovy fuckers".
For all its faults (the mysterious predominance of music by Paul Young), the Tube was gloriously visual, which is why it feels a bit weird that it's returned as a Channel 4 Radio show.
Last Friday's comeback largely kept to the old format: 6pm, Friday. Three presenters (Konnie Huq, Emily Rose and Blur's Alex James). Big stars (REM, New Order), lesser known names (plaintive Scots chimings from Camera Obscura) and at least one band so inscrutably obscure that even a down-with-the-kids music journo like myself hasn't the faintest idea who they are (Dem, a hip-hop duo with a combined age of 25).
Old and new rub shoulders quite a lot. The pronouncement that the programme's original incarnation "first brought REM to Britain) pops out alongside an excitable proclamation of "the first ever radio broadcast by Eskimo", who turn out to be an oddball, Jackanory-meets-rap meets powerpop concoction.
Full marks to this Tube for retaining the commitment to new music, but it seems strange to give the task to Anthony H Wilson, who won the musical World Cup once with Joy Division and Happy Mondays but whose Midas touch deserted him long ago. The show's nadir came when the ex-Factory boss unveiled a genre called "screamo" to some seriously unimpressed youngsters, although there was something disturbingly compulsive about the 56-year-old's heroic attempts to convince teens that a combination of 90s trance music and death metal vocals is really where it's at.
At least the audio format meant we were spared the visual cringe factor of the REM "scoop" turning out to be AHW interviewing the bassist on the phone. You don't need visuals to suss that the New Order 'exclusive' was a recording from a recent live gig. But when Alex James introduces Domino label oddballs Clinic as "live music with gowns and masks", you're left wondering what that looks like.
The second episode is on tonight but they're going to have to work much harder if this seemingly lower-budget sequel isn't to disappear entirely down the Tube. What did anybody else think?
