Abba at the BBC

If you fancy listening to some classic Abba songs and their appearances on the BBC then this programme is for you.

Abba won the 1974 Eurovision song contest held in Britain and pretty soon they were on Top of the Pops rather worse for wear with all the celebrations singing their winning entry Waterloo.

Abba had a meteoric rise and really were at one time the biggest band in the world we see some their performances at the BBC like entertaining holidaymakers in Torbay in a 1975 Seaside Special and clips from the 1979 BBC special Abba in Switzerland. Mike Yarwood always boasted that at their prime and their busy schedule he managed to coax them into appearing on his show and you see them singing Thank you for the music.

Abba's final BBC appearance was on The Late Late Breakfast show in 1982 where they refute the rumours that the band are splitting up but then they did. An end of the greatest Euro pop band in history.

The programme does cheat a bit by showing some videos and promotional films rather than performances at the BBC.

In this hour-long special, there are amazingly only a handful of *genuine* BBC Abba music clips. The rest are promo items (or, in one case, foreign TV clips) masquerading as BBC footage. Just because "Crackerjack" showed an Abba promo video, that doesn't make it an "Abba at the BBC" clip. Total fiddle.

The clips shown are hacked down to 16:9 and haven't even been replaced by modern transfers of the films used. Soundtracks are mono (even when the sound is the record version, rather than a re-recording as, for example, per the "Top Of Pops" Waterloo).

"Chuck it together, lads. Is it knock-off time yet?"