On its 25th anniversary, it was time for another revamp, but the new set looked horrible and the old theme tune by Paul Hardcastle (The Wizard) remained, despite it already sounding old fashioned. New producer Paul Ciani decided to hire new presenters, so people like Andy Crane, Simon Parkin, Jenny Powell & Anthea Turner started turning up, much to everyone's bemusement. The design had started to look very tacky, and again the programme was becoming something of an embarrassment. By 1991, a current episode looked not dissimilar to a 1984 episode, which wasn't a good thing. Ciani abstained from the producer's chair due to illness and Stan Appel returned as a temporary replacement.

Later he began to run the entire Top 40 along the bottom of the screen under a video midway through the programme, but this led to a lack of structure to each show. Ciani never came back and Appel then took charge permanently - even though he was clearly too old to be doing so. It was decided to completely revamp the series, in an attempt to make it essential viewing, but what a way to do it...

With all this, TOTP ceased to become the place to find out what was popular.

Appel's second mistake was the creation of another rule - acts had to sing live on the programme . This was idiotic, and pandered to the "You can't hear the words" mentality that TOTP should not have been encouraging. Instead of celebrating pop music for what it was, it began to penalise it. Acts like Cathy Dennis & Dannii Minogue suffered under the new regime, being unable to perform to their full potential, and it wasn't as if people were buying their records because of their fantastic singing voices. Even more fatally this discriminated against dance acts that within a few months had become the major force in pop music. Acts like 2 Unlimited, Prodigy & Utah Saints had to sing live, which they clearly weren't supposed to do - therefore their performances on the programme sounded nothing like their records. It's instructive that the only praise for the new format in the Radio Times came from a 40-year old, exactly the wrong sort of audience.

that had a loyal audience of record buyers and there was the opportunity to perform for longer periods of time. The Roxy only offered 3 minutes of miming in front of an audience who hadn't turned off after Crossroads.

Eventually Thames & TVS began scheduling the series at 12.30am (00.30hrs), and very soon TOTP was a monopoly again. They were very fortunate as the series was very weak at the time - Peel had left and their only idea to counteract The Roxy (who used regular presenters) was getting Mike Smith & Gary Davies to do almost every show. The end of the year saw the BBC team up with ABC to launch an (thankfully short-lived) American version of the series, which led to a few programmes full of boring, mushe US-derived material.

This continued for a while, and even the return of Michael Hurll as a holiday relief in 1992 did little to brighten things up - in fact things got even worse, as Hurll selected a range of acts that ould have meant little to the average teenager.