Only Olivia

After three years away Olivia arrived back in England to record this special for the BBC. It's quintessentially England in the 1970s from the low-key sets; concentration on ballads, right down to Olivia's long flowing white dress.

The special was filmed in front of a live audience and Olivia uses this to add even more sparkle to her songs. She adds a more country-style to Let It Shine and Take Me Home Country Roads and her ballads are at their most tender and heartbreaking.

To break up the studio setting the BBC include lovely footage of Olivia driving her car and visiting horses in the English countryside. There's also some great footage of Olivia disco dancing to Love Is Alive.

Most 70s moment - the special effects of a split screen (with the images spinning)

Interesting fact - John and Pat Farrar come along to help out. Pat Farrar provides backing vocals under her maiden name of Pat Carroll. Mike Sammes (he of the deep voice on Let Me Be There etc.) is also there.

Some fans, from the old UK fan club (1977-78) The Olivia Newton-John Appreciation Society, attended the recording of this special at BBC TV Theatre on the 8th June, some photos of Olivia leaving after the show

16 Oct 2022 update

Watching Only Olivia properly for the first time in the early hours of Sunday night, almost half a century later.

I never saw Only Olivia on TV as broadcast. I saw it in washed out multigeneration VHS copies, unsteady audio, no top end and a fuzzy wavery image. That was marginally better than not seeing it at all, but these copies lost most of what was special in Olivia's voice to me. I always wondered what I had missed. Sadly, it was never repeated in the 1980s to the best of my knowledge, despite Olivia’s phenomenal worldwide success with Grease and then Physical.

The BBC showed Only Olivia in full on the 16th October 2022, following their previous evening's tribute Olivia Newton-John at the BBC, and Xanadu so I watched this properly for the first time, in the middle of the night. It was a charming treat. They didn't have HD in 1977, and the sound is still in mono rather than stereo as billed, but it really was rather a delight - Olivia on top form.

Grease had been shooting by the time Olivia returned to the UK in September 1977 to record this, featuring the songs that Olivia sang her way into British audience’s hearts in the early 1970s. Olivia updates the set with some from her American success after she moved there in 1975, and some new songs off her 1977 album Making A Good Thing Better

Only Olivia is a snapshot of Olivia's music just before Grease, very much Sandy 1 rather than Sandy 2 who had yet to strut her stuff to the public eye. Olivia had been away from the UK for about three years, busy making her mark in America, touring many US states, and she had honed her art as a performer since leaving the UK in 1975. Only Olivia has some of great live renditions of her 1970s songs as a result, sung in an intimate setting with the TV studio audience. The set is simple, with a demurely dressed Olivia in a long white dress, gold medium-heeled boots and some gold detail on her top. This outfit is the same as the one Olivia had at her concert on May 8th in New York at the Metropolitan Opera.

Olivia opens with Let Me Be There, segueing to If You Love Me Let Me Know. British audiences had heard these two songs, of course, but they hadn't charted in the UK, whereas they reached 6 and 5 in the US singles charts in 1973 and 1974.

Those two songs are the reason I haven't been around for the last couple of years she tells us, because they started something fantastic for her in America. Olivia takes British viewers back into another US hit from 1975 of Have You Never Been Mellow, the single reached number 1 in the US but didn't chart in the UK.

Take Me Home Country Roads is a little faster than the album, with Olivia singing live intercut with some film of her driving through the English countryside in an open-top vintage car, arriving at a paddock with some horses, cue to sing Pony Ride from Olivia's 1976 album Come On Over.

Olivia shifts the tempo up with a spirited delivery of Let It Shine, from Clearly Love, which was to also feature on her first Greatest Hits album (outside Australia). British viewers of this programme wouldn't get that release until early 1978.

The next song is a rather lovely dreamy rendition of Slow Dancin' from Making a Good Thing Better, Olivia's latest album at the time

Olivia takes the pace up with Love Is Alive - she sang this track on the Love Performance album, which is from a recording in 1976 but only released in 1981, but otherwise Love is Alive has never featured on an album, though she has sung it live on other occasions.

Please Mr Please is the next song, the director seemed to be caught on the hop as they ran the background dance segment with Love is Alive pacing across the transition to the slower ballad, in the visuals. Sound is fine, and the right paced segment is shown when it's time to crossfade again.

Another novelty, again only to be found on the Love Performance album, Olivia performs a medley of Nevertheless and As Time Goes By.

The song Sam is next up, this had done quite well in the UK singles chart, reaching #6 in what had been quite a fallow period for UK singles. Olivia gives us a sensitive rendition

followed by a spirited delivery of Making a Good Thing Better, the title track of the album.

The show is now drawing to a close, and Olivia leaves us with her pre-Physical era signature tune, I Honestly Love You

and that's it - three-quarters of an hour of pure magic in the presence of the lovely Olivia Newton-John is over.

The spell fades, and I am 47 years older than the schoolkid that didn't see this go out the first time. And in colour too, my school-age TV was an old B/W Cossor wreck picked out from a skip and patched up, Olivia first graced that fuzzy screen in 1978's Grease Day. More poignantly, as the spell fades I recall Olivia is no longer with us; this programme was repeated as part of the BBC's Olivia Newton-John tribute evening on the 15th October 2022.

This is probably my favourite of Olivia's TV specials, the others are

A Special Olivia Newton-John - Olivia's first TV special, shown on ABC in the US, 17th November 1976

Olivia - Also from ABC in the US, 1978

Hollywood Nights, ABC, April 1980, just before the Oscars

Physical TV Special, ABC, 8 Feb 1982, based on the Physical videogram

Down Under, HBO

A Night With Olivia, Nine, Australia, 31 October 2002

updated by Richard October 2022. We've left the original screen captures of the fuzzy VHS copies below because they're used elsewhere