REMEMBERING MT-USA AND VINCENT 'FAB VINNIE' HANLEY. BY SANDRA HARRIS.
REMEMBERING MT-USA AND VINCENT ‘FAB VINNIE’ HANLEY. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © MT-USA was a fuppin’ musical-television sensation that we Irish hugely appreciated, because back in the early-to-mid 1980s, also known as the Dark Ages, we only had two television channels, RTE ONE and RTE (can you guess it?) TWO (haha, well done, lol) , and our only musical-television programme was TOP OF THE POPS, which aired for half an hour every Thursday night. Not that I didn’t live for that one precious half hour a week, I did, I totally did. Knowing the Number One chart single for the week was as important to me as, well, as something really, really important, if you get me, and I genuinely probably would’ve stopped breathing if they’d taken it off the air for some reason. But, in 1984, a phenomenon occurred. Mt-USA, or Music-Television USA, its slogan being ‘Music Never Looked Better.’ And it never did! Three hours of a television show on a Sunday afternoon, from two in the afternoon till abo...