Pop and Easy Listening

Stephen Fry explores the relationship between music and light entertainment. Before the advent of youth culture, music had always been at the heart of variety, but when pop arrived on the scene television's reactionary response was to feed viewers a diet of Val Doonican and Engelbert Humperdinck. Even Top of The Pops was predicted to be a flash in the pan, but by the 1970s pop stars such as Cilla Black and Cliff Richard were hosting their own Saturday night shows. Punk put paid to all that, and it has taken over two decades for music to find its way back into the heart of light entertainment. Featuring Cliff Richard, Cilla Black, Nana Mouskouri, Engelbert Humperdinck, Simon Cowell, Pete Waterman, Nigel Lythgoe, Marty Wilde and the Vernons Girls.