1986 saw the debut of one of British television’s longest-running music shows.
The Chart Show was a programme without presenters, voiceover or studio performers that simply focused on music videos.
Alongside the main chart (which was not the official BBC chart), the show counted down several specialist charts, including indie, dance, heavy metal and reggae, showing clips from each entry and pausing for longer extracts from selected videos.
Much was made of emerging computer graphics to fill the titles sequences with colourful cartoon images of funfairs, popping balloons, rockets and spaceships, while video recorder instructions such as REWIND, FFWD and PLAY flashed onto the screen whenever a chart was going to be paused, or jumps were needed to another section.
Without presenters, information about the artists was loaded into superimposed text boxes.
The Chart Show ran on Channel 4 for two years before being taken over by ITV (and retitled The ITV Chart Show), where it stayed on the air for another nine years, moving from Friday evening to Saturday lunchtime (and also going out in the middle of the night in some regions).
The final episode aired on 22 August 1998.
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