Forever (ITV1, 2001-2004)
A long time ago now, when ITV had something that resembled a night time schedule, several music shows would be featured. These covered various genres and formats. I enjoyed The Dance Years (that I reviewed a while ago), and this was another one that I thought was worth setting the video for. Forever was produced by Music Box.
Now it seems that this is the same one that started out as a satellite channel in the mid-80s, definitely rivalling Sky Trax with its mix of music videos and interviews (as I can’t find any clips of Forever online for now I’ll use a picture from Music Box instead). When ITV in the Yorkshire region experimented with going 24 hours, they filled the time with Music Box. You can now watch TV at 3am, incredible!
However, this channel had closed down by the late-80s, and they went on to become an independent production company, making several late-night shows for ITV including heavy metal showcase Noisy Mothers and game show Popped In Crashed Out. But I enjoyed Forever the most out of all of them. There were two formats to this, either looking back at a genre (like Rock Forever) or a year (like 1992 Forever).
Editions would usually be about an hour long, and various music videos would be shown. There was no in-vision host, but a voiceover would offer a little more information about who was being featured. There were also lots of interviews from the archive shown. I did wonder where all these came from, because they clearly weren’t contemporary interviews that were specially made for this show.
I presume that they were all compiled from various Music Box productions. Of course, an hour isn’t exactly long enough to fit in every significant song that defined a genre or year, but in the days before YouTube and the like, this was definitely an interesting way to bring back some of these musical memories. Forever seemed to be an occasional series that just turned up whenever, but it was always worth the wait.
ADAM'S NOSTALGIC MEMORIES 