I wasn't a big fan of Talking Heads when they had mass appeal; I found them to be a little too 'arty' for my tastes in the mid 80's.
I remember overhearing a conversation between two 'art college' students outside the Rivoli, around 1984. The first guy said 'I showed my film to my professor, and he said it had 'NO commercial potential'. The other guy said 'That's amazing'. They were probably huge fans of TH.
I used to download
Old Grey Whistle Test episodes from a torrent site named 'thebox', which went 'tits up' in August, 2014. The site content was exclusively UK TV and radio torrents.
OGWT was a weekly show featuring live music, (as opposed to Top of the Pops, which was mostly mimed/ lip synched performances backed with 'K-Tel style' edited versions of their current chart hits. What was unusual about OGWT was that there was no audience for the show most of the time, other than stage hands. It wasn't concert footage, it was bands playing live on a TV studio sound stage, solely for the purpose of being filmed. That worked surprisingly well, when the band is only performing a single song or two, instead of a set.
There WAS a small studio audience when Bauhaus performed Ziggy Stardust on the show in 1982:
Search YouTube for 'OGWT' and 'Old Grey Whistle Test', and you'll likely find some 70's/ 80's live video you haven't seen before. The show aired from 1971-88, but it's heyday was from about 1977-83.
In the UK, people have to buy a license to watch TV, ever 'over air' broadcasts. They actually have inspectors who go to people's homes to make sure that they don't have an unlicensed TV set! TV license fees fund many of the 'PBS style' documentaries on the BBC which are still popular with senior citizens.
Many people there can't afford both Internet AND a TV license, so thebox posted almost all of the new broadcasts daily online, as well as any older material which was UK produced - American shows which aired in Britain didn't qualify. A lot of members were 'insiders' who had access to video tape stored in station's vaults, perhaps unseen since a one-time broadcast in the 1970's.
Much of the history of UK television broadcasting has been lost forever because the original broadcast tapes have been 'wiped', ie: The BBC re-recorded new material onto the original video tapes. For a show like Top of the Pops, only a fraction of the pre-1975 shows still exist in their original form, or in some cases, only a black and white version. Partial restorations of some of those colour episodes have surfaced, but usually with sound muted while the show host is speaking. These are sourced from foreign market broadcasts, where other countries would dub the announcer's voice into their own language, but the audio for the songs would remain in English.
