The relationship between pop music, youth culture and television has often been an uneasy one. Here’s a critical look back at one of the most fondly-remembered British pop shows, sixty years since it first appeared.

‘The weekend starts here’ was the oft-quoted slogan of one of the most influential British pop music programmes of all time: Ready Steady Go! The show was transmitted live (initially in London and then on other commercial stations nationally) at 6.08 on Friday evenings, as many younger viewers prepared for the first evening out of the weekend. It began in August 1963 and ran until the end of 1966. Ready Steady Go! appeared at a historical moment when several key cultural industries in the UK – not just music and television, but also fashion, design and advertising – were significantly expanding and converging; and it reflected several of the broader cultural changes of the period, not only in the position of youth, but also to some extent in relation to ‘race’ and gender. (I’ve been writing about these developments in several recent posts and essays, listed here.)

The show was produced by the regional commercial station Associated-Rediffusion, and was originally broadcast from a cramped basement studio in its Television House on Kingsway in central London. In 1965, it moved to more spacious studios in suburban Wembley. Although it was by no means the first music programme (on either side of the Atlantic) to feature a studio audience of dancers, it was intended to resemble a dance club: the performers and presenters were mostly on the studio floor, close to jostling groups of young people, and the cameras and technicians wove their way through the crowds, sometimes seemingly at risk to life and limb. For the first couple of years, the performers mimed to recordings, although following a ban instituted by the Musicians’ Union, the music went live in April 1965. 

Various presenters came and went in the early days, although the two key figures were Keith Fordyce and Cathy McGowan. While Fordyce came across as somewhat avuncular in his suit and tie (he was actually only 35 when the programme began, although he seemed much older), McGowan was just twenty. Initially recruited while a junior secretary at Woman’s Own magazine, she apparently passed the audition on the strength of her enthusiasm for fashion, and joined the show in 1964. While her presentation skills were fairly limited at the start, it was her ‘amateurishness’ and ‘naturalness’ – especially when compared with Fordyce’s unflappable, radio-trained approach – that seemed to endear her to many younger viewers. After Fordyce eventually departed in 1965, McGowan remained as the main presenter.

McGowan’s wardrobe drew from emerging fashion designers like Barbara Hulanicki and Mary Quant; while the programme’s sets (with their collage backdrops) and animated title sequences reflected the pop art styles of the time, with influences from artists like Andy Warhol, Peter Blake and Derek Boshier. The programme made no attempt to disguise its mode of production, with cameras, technicians and crew all clearly visible (an approach that was equally apparent in the first Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night, which appeared in 1964.). To some extent, the programme sought to achieve a kind of documentary feel, as though we (the audience at home) were witnessing events that the camera had happened to capture, rather than performances that were deliberately staged for it. Although the cumbersome cameras and the live broadcasting left little scope for visual innovation, the use of large close-ups – along with occasional crude special effects and rapid editing – added to the sense of shambolic immediacy.

 

Over the years, many of the original participants (along with some assiduous fans) have developed a shared story about Ready Steady Go! Predictably, this is a story that is suffused with a good dose of rosy nostalgia: it’s as much about the broader idea of ‘the sixties’ as it is about the historical realities of the times. This is a highly generational story: it’s about the idea of youth, and indeed about the ‘youthful revolution’ that the sixties are often seen to represent. It’s also a story that appeals to what some have called the ‘rockist’ tendency in writing about popular music: the idea that rock music (as distinct from mere commercial pop) embodied inherently subversive or revolutionary values that precipitated massive social and cultural change.

As early as 1969, Nik Cohn’s polemical history of rock Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom was celebrating the programme’s status as ‘the only genuinely teen TV show this country ever had’. Twenty years later, sixties historian Jonathon Green was arguing that ‘the weekend starts here’ was ‘the rallying cry of a generation’. In the early 1990s, Philip Norman was proclaiming the programme’s realism and authenticity: ‘the atmosphere was that of a King’s Road party where the performers themselves had only just chanced to drop by’.

This general view of the show has been shared by many academic researchers. Writing in the mid-1980s, Iain Chambers waxes lyrical about the ‘sharply dressed teenagers dancing to hip sounds’, and the programme’s ‘fusion of spontaneity and style’. Ready Steady Go!, he argues, was ‘the unique television programme, both then and now, to have its finger on the pulse of contemporary teenage Britain’.

In these discussions, Ready Steady Go! is typically contrasted with other contemporary programmes, like the BBC’s panel show Juke Box Jury (1959-67) and ITV’s more ‘light entertainment’ offering Thank Your Lucky Stars (1961-66). The latter are frequently condemned as staid and adult-oriented – although it’s worth noting that both of them lasted longer than RSG during the same period. Retrospectively, the major comparison is with the BBC’s Top of the Pops, which was launched less than six months after Ready Steady Go! While the influence of RSG is evident in the inclusion of studio dancers, the more spacious sets allowed for greater separation between audience and performers. The BBC show was (as its name implies) much more straightforwardly focused on chart music, where Ready Steady Go! was freer to focus on emerging performers (although, in an age where there was very little pop music on radio, an appearance on the show was a powerful promotional tool, as those in the industry undoubtedly recognised).

This is a story that has now sedimented into rarely questioned wisdom. Google throws up several recent journalistic claims about Ready Steady Go! as the show that ‘soundtracked a revolution’, and of the period as a kind of golden age of youth – ‘to have been a teenager in the 1960s was surely very heaven’. Such claims were heavily recycled in a celebratory hour-long BBC documentary from 2020 (available on YouTube) that brought together many of the key participants, including assistant producer Vicki Wickham, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and designer Nicholas Ferguson, along with several musicians and dancers. Ready Steady Go!, we were told, was ‘the most innovative music show ever’; it was a programme that ‘broke all the rules’; it ‘showed what it was like in the clubs’, presenting ‘an atmosphere of hedonism and pleasure’; it was a programme in which ‘youth was celebrated, and celebrated itself’, part of a broader ‘time of exuberance, hope and passion’.

 

Last weekend, I attended the British Film Institute in London, along with many others of a certain age, to watch around seven hours of screenings and discussion intended to mark the programme’s sixtieth anniversary. The programme was originally transmitted live, and of the 173 editions, only nine have been preserved in some form: parts of many of them are available on YouTube, along with the BBC documentary mentioned above, but the scarcity and selectiveness of this material makes it hard to be definitive about the real Ready Steady Go!

Popular memories – and the clips included in retrospective documentaries – tend to focus very selectively on the bands of the first British rhythm and blues ‘boom’ like the Rolling Stones and the Animals, along with the Beatles, as well as some of the African-American artists then recording for Stax and Motown. To some extent, there seems to have been a consciously multicultural policy at Ready Steady Go! The executive producer, Elkan Allan, apparently insisted on the inclusion of black dancers in the studio audience. The white British star, Dusty Springfield, an aficionado of African American music, seems to have acted as a ‘taste maker’, advising the producers on the latest black US stars to book. This resulted in some notable special editions, including a ‘Sounds of Motown’ special in 1965, and a furiously energetic show devoted to Otis Redding in 1966, both available on YouTube. Notably, both shows featured white British stars performing alongside the US visitors: the former has a memorable duet between Dusty and Martha Reeves, while the later features Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe.

Now sadly wiped was a James Brown special from 1966. I have very strong memories of seeing this at the time, at the age of eleven. I particularly remember that at one stage Brown dropped to his knees, seemingly overcome with emotion, and was wrapped in a cloak and comforted by one of his flunkeys – a routine which I subsequently discovered was a standard feature of all his performances. We can only speculate about the likely effects of all this on British society in the mid-1960s, as it gradually emerged from the shadow of empire: certainly, it made a lasting impact on one weedy white boy growing up in suburbia – although this programme also attracted a flurry of racist complaints, not least in the right-wing press.

Other memorable Ready Steady Go! performances contained what might be called ‘moments of danger’ that became a more familiar aspect of youth culture in the years that followed. While the Beatles came across as merely cheeky and cheerful, the Rolling Stones (or at least Mick Jagger and Brian Jones) radiated an unsettling sexuality, and the Who were more straightforwardly wild and destructive. This was not the kind of thing your parents would have wanted you to watch – or so we imagined.

Even so, looking at some of the few remaining complete programmes, it becomes clear that the routine content of Ready Steady Go! was rather less revolutionary. Interviews and appearances were partly (though not exclusively) determined by the industry’s need to promote new records to a national audience – a phenomenon that the Beatles themselves liked to satirize, talking direct to camera about the price of their latest releases. As George Melly noted in his book Revolt into Style (1970), Ready Steady Go! was the programme that enabled the business of pop to operate at a national scale.

The shows I watched – especially the earlier ones, from 1963 and 1964 – were dominated by mainstream music that would have been the staple content of ‘variety’ and ‘light entertainment’ shows like Thank Your Lucky Stars. Performers like Helen Shapiro, Eden Kane and Cilla Black represented a strong continuity with conventional 1950s pop, which was equally shared by some of the safer bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and the Fourmost. And despite selective memories, this was the kind of music that dominated the pop charts at the time.

The show also featured miming contests – four girls mime to a Brenda Lee record, and the winner receives a prize from Paul McCartney – and demonstrations of the latest dance crazes, in which regulars Patrick Kerr and Theresa Comfrey introduced viewers to the likes of the mashed potato, the block and the hitchhike. While the producers may have sought to recreate the atmosphere of a ‘hip’ London dance club, the show was not open to all-comers: the dancers in the audience were carefully recruited by talent scouts and through auditions. Even moments of danger, like the invasion of the stage that concluded one Rolling Stones performance, seem to have been tacitly encouraged by the production team. After the move to Wembley Studios in 1965, the distance between the performers and the audience was greater, and the higher-level staging was closer to that of Top of the Pops.

While the show certainly sought credibility with the more cutting-edge youth subcultures of the time, it was also aimed at a wider family audience: as the listing magazine TV Times suggested, it was targeted not just at the young, but at ‘the young at heart’. Indeed, it’s possible that, in some families at least, programmes like this offered some basis for dialogue between the generations – and it’s hard to think of programmes that would serve such a function today.

There is also some evidence that Cathy McGowan was not unanimously regarded as the street fashion trendsetter, or indeed the ‘quintessential mod girl’ as she is now described. One mod recollects that she was roundly mocked as inauthentic: from the point of view of more dedicated subculturalists, her clothes were last month’s fashions, and her style was merely fake. It seems that the show fairly quickly lost its cool cachet, at least with mods themselves.

Of course, it’s hardly a revelation to suggest that the apparent spontaneity and authenticity of Ready Steady Go! were carefully constructed – nor indeed that the programme marked a significant step forward in terms of the marketing of youth culture and of popular music. My point here is not to burst the bubble, merely to raise a few questions about the shared story of youthful revolution.

As Simon Frith has argued, the relationship between television and music has always been an uneasy one. Among other things, this is partly to do with the relations between visual and verbal dimensions, and with the social contexts in which these different media are used. However, in the case of popular music, it also reflects a continuing anxiety about the position of youth – about the relations between adults and young people, and the threat to the wider social order that young people are sometimes seen to represent. Certainly in the first thirty or forty years of television’s existence, televised versions of popular music were an arena in which that perceived threat had to be carefully managed. For the most part, TV pop programmes have always seemed behind the times, or focused more on the crass, commercial dimensions of the music than on its risky cutting edge. According to Frith, rock music emerged despite rather than because of television; and as a music fan, you would watch for the things you liked despite rather than because of the way they were presented.

Ultimately, I’m not convinced that Ready Steady Go! was very much of an exception in this respect. The programme’s lasting reputation can partly be explained by good timing: it began life at the right time, and ended at the right time too. It was cancelled because its ratings were falling – it appeared to be losing the contest with Top of the Pops – but crucially it didn’t outstay its welcome. Yet while much of the original material has been sadly lost, a fair amount of what remains is still compelling and highly enjoyable.

 

Key sources:

Frith, Simon (2002) ‘Look! Hear! The uneasy relationship of music and television’, Popular Music 21(3): 277-290

Lowy, Adrienne (2010) ‘Ready Steady Go! Televisual pop style and the careers of Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw and Lulu’, in Ian Inglis (ed.) Popular Music and Television in Britain Aldershot: Ashgate

Neill, Andy (2020) Ready Steady Go! The Weekend Starts Here London: BMG