TV Pop Diaries
Pop Music on British Television 1955 - 1999

Intended to attract the Kerrang! crowd, ECT was a feature of Channel 4's Tube replacement for the spring/summer of 1985, The Friday Zone.

ECT 'Extra Celestial Transmission' was taped at the massive Wembley Studios complex in London and was produced by Keith McMillan's Keefco productions, who were not only producing promo clips, but also numerous live concerts for the home video market.

It invited the current cream of British metal and hard rock, seemingly riding a new wave of success as reflected by Kerrang magazine, Tommy Vances' Friday Night Rock Show on Radio One and numerous top forty hits. In the seventies bands like these would be reluctant to release singles, fearing the call that they had sold out, but by the mid-eighties a more image-conscious era prompted bands to have dressers and designers on hand to make them look good. The problem was that they all ended up looking the same. Anyone looking at MTV at the time would have problems telling them apart.

TV Times didn't pull any punches when describing the second broadcast show, headed by Girl School referring to them as "a bizarre comic spectacle."

Everyone played live and loud, but sadly, the show was broadcast just before the introduction of NICAM stereo TV broadcasts in the UK, so no-one really got the benefit of the live and loud studio sound, despite there being five mixing desks. The show had four stages, one of which cost £60,000 alone.

Between some of the live acts dance troupe Beauxartz would perform.

The success of the show mirrored the success of the post New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands and American hair metal bands, but despite its popularity it never made it to a second series, like so many of these Friday evening shows that Channel Four broadcast.

Some of the unused clips from the show later turned up in a Channel 4 filler show Rewind in 1986.

THE FRIDAY ZONE: ECT

C4/Keefco

12th April 1985 - 14th June 1985