Ready Steady Go! launched on ITV in August 1963 with the tagline "The weekend starts here", becoming Britain's first major pop TV show aimed at the emerging youth scene and predating its BBC rival Top of the Pops. Unlike Top of the Pops' reliance on official chart rankings, the show focused on London's mod and beat-boom scene, giving early UK television exposure to acts such as Jimi Hendrix and The Beach Boys, and helping introduce Motown artists including The Supremes and Stevie Wonder to British audiences via a April 1965 special hosted by Dusty Springfield.

The programme's decline stemmed from ITV's fragmented regional scheduling compared with the BBC's unified reach, and a costly shift to live performance after abandoning lip-syncing due to a Musicians' Union ban on pre-recorded backing tracks. Its final episode aired on 23 December 1966. Over its run the show cycled through four different theme songs: The Surfaris' "Wipe Out" initially, then Manfred Mann's "5-4-3-2-1" from 1964, followed briefly by their "Hubble Bubble (Toil and Trouble)", before The Who's "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" took over in 1965; the final broadcast used The Rolling Stones' "Goin' Home".