info nuggets (12. 183)

We really enjoyed this appreciation from Open Culture of VH-1’s Pop-Up Video, the sister-network and alternative to MTV launching on New Year’s day 1985, premiering over a decade into the channel’s run in October of 1996, pitched as antidote to shortening attention spans attributed to rise of MTV itself with barely the audience stamina for suffering a four-minute music video. The parent company expressed initial scepticism as then owners Blockbuster rental outlets felt they knew little enthusiasm for foreign films interpreted as viewers not wanting to read on screen dialogue in subtitles. The pilot, featuring Tina Turner’s “Missing You” with other standards on rotation, nonetheless, proved compelling and the show continued, expanding its profile with anecdotes and facts (classified by the above title), of varying relevance, sublimating as dialogue bubbles—all before there were forums for such trivia, requiring a good deal of research and cold-calls to artists, producers and grips involved in production. The meta-commentary was compared to the contemporary phenomenon of MST3K (see previously), as a programme for “TV-people who-are-sick-of-TV.”