Anyone who knows punk history in the U.K. is doubtless familiar with So It Goes, Tony Wilson’s remarkable program on the Granada network that provided so many vital punk bands, including the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie and the Banshees, with their first TV exposure. The sheer volume of terrific live footage that appeared on the program is mind-boggling, including virtually every prominent British act of the era, as well as a good number from the United States. Wilson obviously went on to found the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester and was one of the key figures in the inception of Factory Records. In the movie 24 Hour Party People, Steve Coogan, playing Wilson, inhabits a re-creation of the So It Goes set. (In addition to being portrayed by Coogan in 24 Hour Party People, Craig Parkinson also played him in Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film Control.)

In this whimsical and brief clip from what must have been the final episode of the show or close to it—Wilson says “Happy Christmas” and the last full show aired on December 11, 1977, so this may have been tacked on to that final show? In any case, this clip seems to be a mashup of two clips, one with the punk poet John Cooper Clarke and the other featuring Tony Wilson’s curious “countdown” of the top punk acts to enhance So It Goes in 1977.
 

 
The title of this video is “Granada so it goes reverse TOTP countdown 1977” which manages to set up the “countdown” as a vague alternative to Top of the Pops, which is fairly plausible. Watching it, it’s hardly clear what the 1-32 ranking is supposed to mean, and the positioning of the Clash as the #32 and last entry suggests that further down the list meant “better,” insofar as it meant anything.

If nothing else, the list (aside from a couple of puzzling entries like “Sooty”) isn’t a bad starting point for an exploration of the galvanizing U.K. music of 1977 and beyond. 
 

1. Van Morrison
2. Buzzcocks
3. John Cooper Clarke
4. Elvis Costello
5. Penetration
6. John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett
7. Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias
8. Nick Lowe
9. Iggy Pop
10. The Movies
11. Roy Hill
12. Tom Robinson Band
13. The Stranglers
14. Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers
15. Free
16. Mink DeVille
17. Sad Café
18. John Dowie
19. The Jam
20. Muddy Waters
21. Poly Styrene
22. XTC
23. The Pirates
24. Siouxsie & the Banshees
25. The Dregs
26. Sex Pistols
27. Dave Edmunds
28. Magazine
29. Sooty
30. Steel Pulse
31. Ian Dury
32. The Clash

 
If you’d like to see the live Clash clip that gets cut off at the end, I think it might be this “embedding-disabled” clip.