The Alternative TOTP Canon #1: Sparks - Get In The Swing

Whenever the subject comes up, the same few clips from the Pops archive get brought up - Bowie and Ronson, Morrissey's flowers, Cobain's baritone, Jocky Wilson Said, Peel and the Faces, Mud and the roadies, All About Eve, Pan's People wagging their fingers at dogs etc. Enough. If we're taking a wider view of the show's history, let's use the time between repeats to create an alternate list of great moments from its history (apart from 1976 because the blog'll get round to them). All suggestions are, as per, welcome.

(NB. We reserve the right to show other clips by some of these artists at some point should we run short of ideas. There's a couple of tremendous Smiths instance, for example.)

With that in mind, here's our first inductee. The Sparks TOTP moment for the ages is the first sight of Ron Mael's moustache and countenance when they did This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us - a USP the band clearly hadn't thought through before, by the way, if you ever see that song's video which is virtually all gauzily lit close-ups of Russell. Move on four singles, though, and we find Ron in white coat and sideways development, Russell marching in tiny shorts, a big brassy/piccolo-y outing for the BBC big band and a young audience who the more the song goes on the more keen they are to look away from the stage they flank. Look at them around the chorus at about 2:25, it can only be assumed a proto-Fathers 4 Justice type was climbing the lighting rig behind the camera run.