How many people, when reading the caption under one contributor "Professor of Pop Music from Sussex ( I think) University" said to themselves "hmmmm now THAT's a job I wouldn't mind"

Bloody hell, what an annoying programme. I'm sure Charles Hazlewood is a lovely fella, but I really didn't need to see him on more than one occasion sitting crossed legged on the floor, eyes closed, smiling beatifically to himself while listening to Wyclef bleedin Jean. Ok, ok, I get it - classical conductor is equally moved by pop music, can we move on now please.

Even the camera angles were annoying - "I'm not looking directly into the lens, but over there as if there's a second camera in the corner, even though everyone in the universe knows that the BBC would never stump up for another one."

And I couldn't give a stuff if Bohemian Rhapsody starts in b flat and ends in F major ("how did we get there?") it still stinks like a bin waiting to be emptied after Christmas.

looked just like Robin Williamson from the Incredible String Band ( who, incidentally, lives just a few doors down from me! ) Any other Word-ers live next door, or close to, rock legends I wonder??

AAAAARRRRRGGGHHH! Who thought it would be a good idea to let classical musicians deconstruct pop songs? It is a waste of time! For one, most pop musicians don't sit around thinking "Hmmm, if I put a diminished 7th here I'll have a number one!" They aren't as analytical as that, thank God.

And why do they always have to sing? Their emotionless, slightly plummy voices always strip any song they go near of any trace of sexiness or passion. Make them stop, somebody!

The point is that what makes a great pop song is always about so much more than just composition... take Abba for example....

It's the sound of those records; the brilliant production... the combination of piano and synths that hasn't dated at all unlike most records from that era...

It's the air of melancholy that lies under the surface of even their most transparently joyful songs... "Dancing Queen" is at once joyous and sad, which elevates it above an average pop song....

It's Agnetha and Frida's voices... completely distinctive, magnificent voices that floated above the music and made it something extraordinary...

Oh I don't know why great records are great... they just are!

Pop music is a mysterious thing... long may it be so.

I thought it wasn't too bad and was pleased to see some different faces on a clip show, in fact I was embarrassed athow vague Phil Jupitus opinions where,and as for John "Napoleon" Harris can we have a show without him for a change. I think it's heartning we have Professor of Pop, I've seen him on other things and he is insightful and engaging, much like good pop music. This Pop Brittania series has been 10X better than the woefully patchy Seven ages of rock. My only caveat is the term "Classic Pop" (you see it all the time in reviews) which is basically pop music that clever people like, so in order to like say Girls aloud the broadsheets and monthly music mags label them "classic". I would've like some non classic, bubblegum or common pop as well it's what most of the charts are full of.

Personally, I thought it was great viewing. Yes, pop music shouldn't bear analysis like this and the premise was dodgy from the start. On the other hand, people shouldn't get too bothered about it. They're only bloody pop songs. It was far better than the vapid 'Girl Group' prog the night before. I thought Abba were average when they came out and still do, can't stand Imagine, thought the main reason Bohemian Rhapsody happened was because the er, bachelor head of EMI at the time was somewhat keen on taking his new signing, satin-trousered young Freddie, to the opera where he heard all that old gubbins, chucked it into the mix and stuck the parts together to create Frankenstein. No-one's complained yet about his strong praise of Joni Mitchell, I note.
The one thing that annoyed me most was the green Converses worn with the suit. There, he really had tried too hard.
Patrick's got it right above. Great records just are, well, great.
And the perfect pop song probably exists somewhere on a Decca B-side from 1962. We just haven't heard it yet. Brian Mathew will play it one Saturday morning.
Apparently, one of The Strawbs lives round here. Beat that. And who is John Harris? I genuinely hadn't heard of him before.

I liked it too: true, Imagine and Bohemian Rhaspody were pretty uninspired choices for discussion but I enjoyed the Joni Mitchell bit and also Jamie T, who was new to me. In a programme called "How Pop Songs Work" you would expect to get a bit of analysis and taking apart, so its a bit unfair to criticise for being over-analytical (don't think he was anyway - the Joni discussion was pretty much from a fan's perspective). I agree that, like humour, too much analysis can ruin a song's appeal but sometimes its interesting to look at why some things work well and others don't, rather than saying "they just do". Anyway, what's wrong with liking classical music as well as popular music? At the end of the day its all just music.

Was that "bachelor head of EMI" Sir Joe Lockwood?
Imagine is awful. So is Bohemian Rhapsody. And so, as far as I'm concerned, is Joni Bloody Mitchell (though I suspect that's a minority opinion round here).
John Harris is a journalist. He was the editor of Select for a while though I'm not sure who he writes for these days. Probably one of the lefty papers I don't read. He turns up on Late Review and things like that from time to time. His book The Last Party (Britpop, Blair & The Decline Of English Rock) is really good, well worth reading if you're at all interested in that era.

The title of the programme was "how pop songs work" not "how do the pop songs that we like this week work", the randomizer results show no programme could ever pick a definitive list and you have to use examples love'em or loathe'em that every one knows well! Also just because artists do something instictively doesn't mean they aren't responding to some "hidden" rules which can be explained.

Gruff Rhys lives on the next street ( I've passed him a few times and have so far resisted greeting him as 'Skylon' as he requested on 'Candylion' ) and, until very recently, Euros Childs and his girlfriend lived three doors up and we would regularly have a chat in the queue at Tesco's. John Harris lives close by too and used to be a regular contributor to a show I used to present for the Beeb. Whilst we're on the subject, Van Morrison and Cerys Matthews both used to live on the street behind my house. ( Although, unfortunately, they didn't share the same house. Now that would be worth watching on TV! )

I think his Radio 2 show is fantastic. He is not restriced in what he plays and finds the links between wildly different sorts of music. I haven't seen this show yet, but will go to the bbc iplayer tonight and have a look.

And surely any music is up for discussion at any level?

I know I'm going slightly over the top but the point is that this is sloppy dumb TV dressed up as something intellegent. It's not that I didn't understand it, it that it was of no consequence. What do you learn from someone repeating a chord sequence at you? It doesn't give you an insight into anything.

OK so Alex Turner has the right amount of talent but he also has been listening to the great bands and has picked up the influences from the best places. What I'm interested in is what those influences are, those influences are why the Artic Monkeys sound the way they do. Oh and how did he manage to write those lyrics? What/who inspired him? That's interesting. Not someone telling me what the chord sequence is.

Would Amy Winehouse write the music she does if her dad hadn't been a big jazz fan. That's why she wrote ‘Back to Black' the way she did, I can't imagine she was thinking about the repetitive chord structure.

..many great pop songwriters WOULD say "If i put a Dflat 7th here, I'd have a hit". Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb are just two songwriters who value the placement of just the right chord in just the right place, and they have often spoken about it. (Check Webb's book "Songwriter")
Most pop composers have little or no theory, but many do. Some, like Damon Albarn have it, but don't discuss it much, as it's seen in some eyes to be anti-creative.
There's room for any approach, as long as it says something, but those great standards of the 30s and 40s (which let's be honest are the best pop songs ever written) couldn't exist without the theoretical skill of their creators.
You don't have to study this stuff, but it certainly interests me.
P.S.when songwriters say stuff like, "Songs are in the air man..I'm just a reciever.." They're lying.

...can get away with wearing Converse with a suit.

but I think your complaints are over the top. This was just a bit of fun, and rather nicely done for all that. It kept me up till 11 to watch the end, and Thursday was a struggle as a result!

I'll concur with gripes about the silly "look over there at imaginary camera 2 while we film a bit from over here" pieces, but the BBC's stacked full of shite like that at the moment. We even get stupid visual effects (matte finish low-res sections, short bits with deliberately unsynched audio and so on) in Gardener's World, FFS.

A lesson from the master

on stuff he's done for Radio 2, a couple of points;

1) the 'looking away from the camera' bit was a little annoying - but Charles doesn't use a script. While this works on radio, on tv it can look as though the camera operator/director doesn't know what he's going to do next - which, in fact, they don't.
2) he is a firm believer in the 'two types of music; good and bad' philosophy, and the connections and similarities that can be drawn between all different types and styles. And he can walk it like he talks it, as well; he's done loads of stuff in South Africa with Black singers, and is - I think - working with the Super Furry Animals on something at the moment.
3) It's a lot easier on radio to compare and contrast different pieces of music - you can just get the record and play it. On tv you have to clear everything, which is a right fag if you're wanting to compare Queen (unmitigated shite, imo) with a piece of opera.
4) On a general note, reviews and analysis quite often brings something to the table that the creators didn't know, or certainly weren't able to crystalise. They just know it works - the job of the critic is to establish and explain why it does, Charles doesn't always manage this, but at least he has a crack at it. Normally much more successfully on his R2 show.
5) He does however, have some interesting ideas about footwear.

Costello couldnt read or write music when he made My Aim is true, This years Model and Armed Forces. He learned to read music much later and to compose a score even later still.Most of his fans would argue that his earlier stuff was his best stuff - as an avid fan I dont agree with this at all - so does it really matter.
What school of music did the Sex Pistols go to and countless others for that matter? They still have their place in the history of popular music and still made music loved by millions.
Why the need to over analyse everything? I thought rock music had primeval origins.

What school of music did the Sex Pistols go to and countless others for that matter? They still have their place in the history of popular music and still made music loved by millions.
Why the need to over analyse everything? I thought rock music had primeval origins.

It was a program about "pop," and I think that could be taken as a fairly narrow genre... where Guns n' Roses aren't pop... I guess, hip-hop isn't pop... and the Sex Pistols certainly aren't... but in this program seems to have taken it as 20th/21st century "popular" music... that covers all sorts of genres, everything from punk bands to Kanye West to Stevie Wonder to Bacharach... perhaps different amounts of sophistication.

I don't see any particularly advanced analysis going on in this program, mostly all pretty basic stuff...

If you're going to play a song using the "12 bar blues" progression, then one way or the other, you're going to have to know that chord sequence! Chances are you'd want to embellish it or use chord substitutions, in which case you'd need to know a lot more...

I guess it's possible someone could sit down at a piano and work out the basic "12 bar blues" sequence for themselves not even knowing what a chord is, but why on earth would they want to do that when it would be far easier to just find out from any number of books? (Or ask someone else, or these days Google it...)

On the other hand, there's a song in the program that used a pentatonic scale over different chords. And it's possible that the songwriter didn't sit down and say, "oh, I'm going to use a pentatonic scale" but it just turned out that way.

But it doesn't really matter since pentatonic scales are so widely used, it's a basic thing for a musician to know. It sounds more complex than it is... it's just a way to know, say, "OK, these five notes are pretty safe" so you can go right ahead and make something up using just those notes and be fairly sure it's not going to clash.

Anyway, IMO not a bad program, certainly better another sociological-type description of pop music or talking about Kylie's underwear over the years or whatever. It's a shame that as a TV program it's perhaps inevitable there is too much detail for those who don't care, and it's too basic for those who do, but nice to see this sort of thing being made.