List of Top of the Pops dance troupes

This is a list of Top of the Pops dance troupes.

In the era before promotional videos were routinely produced for every charting single, the BBC would frequently have neither the band themselves nor alternative footage available for a song selected for the programme. In the first few months of the show in 1964, the director would just scan across the audience dancing in the absence of any other footage, but by October 1964 a decision was made to at least occasionally bring in a dance troupe with a choreographed routine to some of the tracks as a third option, and also to encourage the audience to dance in the show "otherwise they'd just stand around looking gormless".

An initial candidate troupe was the existing BBC TV Beat Girls, but an ex-dancer from the Beat Girls, Jo Cook, was eventually engaged to create a troupe, the all-female Go-Jos., with Cook as choreographer. The Go-Jos also worked outside of Top of the Pops, notably for two years on the Val Doonican show – Doonican said in 1968 “I thought the Gojos were fabulous, something really new. When I got my own television series I just had to have them with me.”

They were initially a three-piece (Pat Hughes for the first edition only, Linda Hotchkin and Jane Bartlett), but their number eventually grew to six (Hotchkin, Bartlett, Lesley Larbey, Wendy Hilhouse, Barbara van der Heyde and Thelma Bignell) with Cook as full-time choreographer. Lulu remembered of their costumes "They mostly wore white boots to the knee and short skirts and the camera would go up the skirt and it was all very risqué."

Their Top of the Pops dancing style was critically described by a later performer as "very typical of the 1960s: hands on your hips, wiggle from side to side, wave your arms in the air and shake your head madly till it almost comes off", though Cook herself said of working on the Doonican show (of which she was dance director) comparing to Top of the Pops, “Pop steps are limited...With Val we have more scope, and we can work to get more of the feel of ballet into our numbers.”

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