Dial MTV is a television series on MTV that played music videos. It premiered February 17, 1986. Much like Total Request Live, Dial MTV played the top five or top ten most requested videos of the day, as requested by viewers who dialed in (hence, the name) to vote for their favorite video. The countdown started with the fifth or tenth most requested video and ended with the most requested. The show generally aired Monday through Friday for 30 minutes to one hour. The scheduling and length fluctuated over the years.
The show had several different hosts. The best known one in the US was Adam Curry, who was also a VJ on MTV's Headbangers Ball from 1987-1989. On MTV Europe the show was hosted by Rebecca de Ruvo]. The video to be #1 longest was "Pour Some Sugar on Me" by Def Leppard. It was #1 on the show from May 26-September 5, 1988, a total of 73 days.
Famous quotes containing the word dial:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)