Today, I have another story for you. And like all the best stories, it starts with the DVD menu for At Last Smith & Jones: Vol. 1.
At Last Smith & Jones: Vol. 1 is a slightly odd but extremely watchable Best Of release for the duo, released in 2009. It comprises of material from all four series of the BBC2 incarnation of the show – two episodes per series, making a total of eight compilation episodes – along with the complete 1987 and 1988 Xmas specials.1 None of these compilation shows have end credits of their own, just a BBC logo and a copyright date – everyone who originally worked on the show is listed on the separate credits elsewhere on the DVD.
And as I was reading those DVD credits for Series 4, a certain part of my brain sparked into life.
A consequence of hanging around in Red Dwarf fandom for too long is a minor obsession with early Rob Grant and Doug Naylor material. I knew they had written stuff for The Grumbleweeds and Jasper Carrot, but I never knew they had written anything for Smith & Jones. And yet there were their names, large as life.
What the hell did they write?! I had to know. Time for some investigation.2
An investigation which was initially a little confused. Irritatingly, it seems that every single person in the entire world has Series 4 of Alas Smith & Jones mislabelled in some way – perhaps because the series has seven episodes, rather than the expected six. Out of the three easily available uploads of the series online, two of them miss out the final episode entirely. Meanwhile, someone else on Twitter was also unaware of that final episode, while another person had Episode 7 mislabelled as Episode 6. This is the kind of nonsense which keeps me awake at night.
So let’s just skip straight to the paperwork and avoid all that unpleasantness. There is only one sketch Grant Naylor contributed to the whole of Smith & Jones, and that is for the final show of the run, Episode 7, transmitted on the 26th November 1987.
Which means that the sketch Rob and Doug wrote was the following3 – in fact, the very final sketch of Series 4:
It is, in many ways, an extremely traditional sketch. In fact, let’s be blunt: it’s a Two Ronnies sketch.4 A rather unpleasant Two Ronnies sketch, I grant you, but Griff is literally just pulling Corbett faces throughout most of it. If you can bring yourself to focus on them, rather than his dangling eyeball.
The basis of the sketch is simple. Mel and Griff play two film extras in a horror film. However, there is a bit of disagreement about their respective approaches to the role. Mel Smith’s zombie extra will not be screaming as the script demands, you see. Instead, he will be merely saying the word “Arg”. Griff isn’t convinced, so Mel tries to convince him:
ZOMBIE: You see, at the moment of his death, the last thing that crosses my character’s mind is the name of the woman he loves, you see.
LIVING DEAD: ‘Arg’?
ZOMBIE: No, no… ‘Arg-nes’.
LIVING DEAD: ‘Arg-nes’? Well there’s no such name Arg-nes, nobody’s called Arg-nes, it’s Agnes isn’t it?
ZOMBIE: Well you can’t expect perfect diction from a bloke having nails being hammered into his head, can you?
Very droll, Minister. And to be honest, if this was the only thing there was to talk about with this sketch, I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this post. But thanks to Daniel Bowen, things are about to get a whole lot more interesting.
Because the origins of this sketch go back further. Much further.
* * *
It’s fair to say that not nearly enough has been written about Grant Naylor’s early radio work. That said, Rob Grant’s website is a goldmine in this area. Covering their very earliest days at BBC Manchester, the only upsetting thing is that his biography ends before the boys have even started work on Spitting Image. Please update your website, Rob. I will give you a full £5.50 for your trouble.
Some of the most fascinating material – never talked about anywhere else, at least to my knowledge – are his early tales about Grant Naylor writing shows for radio DJ Tony Brandon. How about this, for instance, about an unbroadcast pilot the pair wrote for him in the early eighties?5
“So, reluctantly, they agree to write a pilot. They based the whole thing on a sketch they’d written called The Film Extra, which was about, well, a film extra, who was boasting to his peers that he had a line of dialogue. In fact, the dialogue was the word ‘Arg’ which he is supposed to utter as he’s crushed by a runaway tumbrel.”
Hang on, that sounds familiar. Wait a minute, there’s a sample of the script…
BRANDON: Perhaps it was the name of his one true love.
EXTRA: His one true love was called ‘Arg’?
BRANDON: No, no. ‘Arg-nes’.
EXTRA: ‘Arg-nes’?
BRANDON: He is being crushed by a runaway tumbrel.
Amazing.
Sadly, this pilot was never broadcast, and the above quote is the only publicly available material from it. (Who knows if the final show even exists now?) As recounted by Rob Grant, they wrote the pilot on the understanding that it wouldn’t be picked up for a series. Unfortunately, a series was then unexpectedly commissioned, and they realised they had absolutely nowhere to go with the idea. After an abandoned second try – a series called Blue Skies, about two failed stand-up comedians – Rob and Doug finally created Wally Who? for Brandon.
Ah, yes, Wally Who? – a show I’ve talked about before on here. A sitcom about the indefatigable Wally Thornton, an idiot living in a caravan, and his ludicrous friends. The series starts off badly, but in my opinion improves as it goes along. You can listen to five of the episodes here, on my old stomping ground Ganymede & Titan. And if you look down that list of episode titles, one of them should hopefully stand out to you.
That episode is “I Want to Be in Movies”, first transmitted on Radio 2 on the 21st November 1982 – almost exactly five years before the Smith & Jones sketch. And while Rob Grant neglects to mention it, it clearly takes elements from that very first unbroadcast Tony Brandon pilot.6 Hey, why waste material that they had already written for him?
So this was – as far as I am aware – the very first time this material was actually broadcast.
Download “Wally Who? – I Want to Be in Movies – Excerpt”
And to complete our trio of quotes of the same basic material:
WALLY: He’s haunted by the memory of his one true love. And, in his dying breath, he calls out her name.
STEVE: ‘Arg’?
WALLY: No, no, no. Her name’s not Arg. It’s ‘Arg-nes’.
STEVE: ‘Arg-nes’? There’s no such name! It’s Agnes!
WALLY: You can’t expect perfect diction when getting crushed to death by a runaway cart!
What’s notable when comparing this with the Smith & Jones incarnation is that you can easily tell which bits of the Smith & Jones sketch are definitely Rob and Doug, and weren’t altered by the rehearsal process. In particular, the amusing phrase “perfect diction” is intact in both versions.
* * *
And there lies the tale of “Arg” – at least to the best of my ability, unless that original Tony Brandon pilot exists, and manages to leak out somehow. So let’s just gaze one more time at the paperwork for the Smith & Jones incarnation of the sketch, five years later.
Hmmm, recorded on the 25th October 1987. That’s surely quite close to the recording dates for Series 1 of Red Dwarf. Surely not…
Bloody hell.
“Arg” was recorded at Television Centre in London, alongside a bunch of other Smith & Jones sketches for Series 4. Meanwhile, 160 miles north-west, at New Broadcasting House in Manchester, the Red Dwarf episode “Confidence & Paranoia” was being shot… on the same evening.
Grant Naylor material, being shot at exactly the same time, in two entirely different areas of the country.
Nobody really knew back in 1987. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever really been discussed before. But that unremarkable Sunday evening is as good a time as any to mark the major transition in Rob and Doug’s career. The pivot between Grant Naylor’s sketch-writing days, and a little science fiction sitcom which took on a life of its own.
Both happening at once. For perhaps the only time.
With thanks to Al Dupres.
Sadly, Vol 2. – intended for material from their six series over on BBC1 – never made it to the shelves. ↩
Investigating this, investigating that. General investi… sorry, force of habit. ↩
Though credit to Darrell Maclaine-Jones, who figured this out without the benefit of PasC sheets. ↩
One of my favourite things about Smith & Jones is their magpie approach to sketch comedy. Indeed, the opening joke of “Arg” – the caption “SKETCH SET ON A FILM SET” – is the climax of a running gag throughout Series 4, and is the most Pythonesque joke you’ll see this side of Alexei Sayle’s Stuff. ↩
Rob doesn’t actually mention the date in his anecdote, but by a process of elimination, it’s almost certainly the tail end of 1981, or the start of 1982. ↩
It doesn’t seem to be a straight remake, however. Rob Grant mentions that in the original pilot, “he destroys the day’s shoot”. This doesn’t happen in the Wally Who? episode. ↩