 | 2001, a pop odyssey! How fondly we remember the days of Top of the Pops Plus on a Sunday morning. Perfect TV fodder for those of us who danced just a little too much the night before. Meanwhile, the main show moved from Elstree to a temporary home in Riverside Studios before settling back at Television Centre in the Autumn. They even let the web team moved out of our broom cupboard in Central London to a post-war prefab over the tube tracks. It's no fun making a website when you have to hold down everything movable every 2 minutes as a train goes past. But somehow, we managed it.
|  | |  | 2001 was a strange year. Geri went super-slim, Boyzone split (but Ronan never told the others), Mariah Carey entertained the troops in Kosovo, and REM's Peter Buck chucked a pot of yoghurt over an air hostess. And then there were the Sugababes. At the beginning of the year Sugababes had a singer called Siobhan, and by the end of it, they had a singer called Heidi, who used to be an Atomic Kitten. Confused? So were we! And speaking of the Kittens, read on for more on their greatest year...
| |  | Hear'SayBelieve it or not, it's only been four years since the first reality TV pop act hit the charts, and by crikey they had a rollercoaster ride. If only Nasty Nigel (Simon Cowell's dad, basically) had thought to finish building the rollercoaster before setting it going. D'oh! |  | |  | Jennifer Lopezhad an excellent diva moment at Top of the Pops in 2001. For her performance of 'Play', Jenny demanded 10 dressing rooms, all decked in muslin, for 60 people, all dressed in, like, beetle-skin furs. And they all came into the Pops studio to clap at her mimed performance. Now THAT'S a star, folks... | | |  | Atomic Kitten were a Liverpudlian wannabe Spice Girls (Scouse Girls, anyone?) whose album boasted the worst cover photo this side of death metal. Then came 'Whole Again', Kerry Katona's McFadden-based split from the band, the arrival of Jenny 'A Touch Of' Frost, 'Eternal Flame', and a reworked album, cover and all. And NOW look at them! | | |  | Robbie WilliamsYou can blame Robbie's dad for this, but 2001 was the year swing music came back. Rob released 'Swing When You're Winning', his tribute to his dad's pre-rock record collection, and suddenly everyone was pretending to be Dean Martin. Dean Gaffney, more like... | | |  | Tom Jones was onstage with Wyclef Jean at the first TOTP Awards, and 'Clef was working the crowd into a frenzy by yelling "Say Tom Jones, say TOM JONES!" over and over again. Then old Tom tried to get in on the act, and started singing "Say WESTCLIFF!" in that leathery voice of his. Nobody knew quite where to look after that... | |
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| |  | "My manhood... it's only 2 inches" - Kevin from Liberty X will never forget saying that to us. It appeared on our homepage for two weeks and subsequently in a lot of papers! |  | |
| | | | |  | | Fragma
'Everytime You...' |
| | | |  | | Shaggy
'It Wasn't Me' |
| | | |  | | Afroman
'Because I Got High' |
| | | |  | | Kylie
'Can't Get You...' |
| | | |  | | Atomic Kitten
'Eternal Flame' |
| | | |  | | Travis
'Sing' |
| | | |  | | Chocolate Puma
'I Wanna Be You' |
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