Channel 5 programme
Following the success of the radio show, The Pepsi Chart Show was launched on Channel 5 on 4 February 1998,[9][10][11] as a rival to the BBC's Top of the Pops weekly music programme. The programme was made for the channel by Endemol's Initial,[12] (with producer Malcolm Gerrie being previously behind Channel 4's The Tube),[13][14] and was the channel's first advertiser-supplied programming deal.[15]
Filming initially took place at the Hanover Grand venue near to London's Regent Street, with Rhona Mitra and Eddy Temple-Morris as presenters. Over time, the show moved on to the Sound venue at nearby Leicester Square, with Fox himself at the helm of the show, usually broadcast at 3.30pm on Saturdays. Live performances at the Sound nightclub were also used in Pepsi Chart TV shows overseas, combining these English language performances with local ones in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Latin America (La Cartelera Pepsi) Russia, Thailand and Australia. The late Caroline Flack was the international presenter for several countries including Norway and Tahiti.
In 1998 The Pepsi Chart Show was one of the Top 30 most-watched shows on Channel 5,[16] but ultimately the TV show never really made much of an impact on the music television audience share, with likely blames being a combination of both restrictions in the analogue terrestrial transmission coverage of Channel 5 at the time, and occasionally a failure in attracting appearances from the bigger-name pop acts. There were notably more live performances from the more 'alternative' acts, and as a result, the TV show sometimes did not fully reflect the music in the radio version of the Pepsi Chart, which was more biased towards commercial radio airplay's hit music.
In the programme's last year it lost two-thirds of its audience, with 100,000 viewers watching the Saturday afternoon programme when the show was axed by Kevin Lygo, Channel 5's new programming boss. The last edition went out on 25 June 2002[16] with Abbie Eastwood and Matt Brown being the final regular presenters of the series. Since The Pepsi Chart Show, the channel has not broadcast a regular weekly chart show in its schedules, though since being owned by ViacomCBS, Channel 5 has broadcast a number of series featuring retro countdowns on a Friday night, under names such as The Greatest Hits of the 80s[17][18] and Britain's Biggest 90s Hits.[19][20] Unlike The Pepsi Chart Show, these shows (featuring a year-by-year countdown of hits from 1970 to 1999) are made in-house by Viacom International Studios UK (VIS) and use data supplied by The Official Charts Company.[21][22]
Compilation albums
Despite the end of the Channel 5 TV show, the Pepsi Chart brand remained strong, helped along by its continued use in exclusive promotional CDs and autoscan radios that were offered to consumers of Pepsi and 7-Up soft drinks. Commercial compilation albums featuring artists from the chart were also produced for the mainstream music market, and frequently boasted chart-topping positions in the compilations category. Other than music CDs, annuals, board games and music quiz DVDs also found their way into high street stores. The Pepsi Chart brand had also managed to spread to other parts of the world, including countries such as The Netherlands, Ireland and Thailand.
