Smashie’s Saturday Smiles

INSPECTOR FOWLER: We have all seen the musical Oliver, and are familiar with the images of jolly, apple-cheeked urchins in big hats. Well, dispel this cozy impression. The Artful Dodger was a thief, and I don’t think he’d have considered himself quite so “at home” in a juvenile detention centre, which is where I’d have put him. Thieving is thieving. And no amount of “oom-pah-pah” or “boom-titty-titty” will change that. An Englishman’s pockets are his castle.

CONSTABLE KRAY: More like his pocket billiard room.

INSPECTOR FOWLER: Detective Constable Kray, there is a place for fatuous, flippant, would-be humorous inanities, and that place is on Noel’s House Party.

– The Thin Blue Line, “The Queen’s Birthday Present”
TX: 13th November 1995

Here’s a question. How many overt parodies of Noel’s House Party can you name? Ones that go beyond the very amusing Thin Blue Line joke above¹, and actually start tearing the show apart properly?

The answer is: a few, but perhaps not as many as you might think.² There’s a fair bit of Edmonds in Alan Partridge, of course, but they’re really using parts of Edmonds’ schtick in a slightly different context, rather than a direct parody. Noel’s House Party is not a chat show.

Stunned to see the Alan Partridge 'moribund' incident actually happened @mumoss @CameronYardeJnr @AccidentalP pic.twitter.com/AL5bPdEC1H

— spankybackpack (@spankybackpack) November 4, 2016

A deliberately half-arsed parody opens Series 2 of This Morning With Richard Not Judy, broadcast on the 21st March 1999, the day after the final episode of Noel’s House Party:

Episode 2.2 of The Fast Show, broadcast on the 23rd February 1996, did a sketch which is really more “generic entertainment show filtered through a Chanel 9 lens”. You can’t see much of Noel Edmonds in Paul Shearer’s performance. Still, it did have a direct reference to NHP’s “Sammy the Chamois”:

This is all just a taster for my favourite sketch, though. Episode 5.3 of French and Saunders, broadcast just a month earlier on the 18th January 1996, included the following glorious sketch. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than take a trip into Jennifer Saunders’ Wrinkly Arsehole.³

Jennifer’s furious running-up-and-down before opening the door – perfectly capturing the “fake energy” of Noel’s House Party which isn’t entirely fair, and yet at the same time is completely fair – is one of the funniest things in the universe.⁴

Despite how amazing it is, this sketch also explains why there aren’t quite as many Noel’s House Party parodies as you might expect. Sure, NHP was an entertainment show, but it was also at heart a comedy show, especially in its first few years. Is there really that much difference between The Balowski Family in The Young Ones, and Noel’s endless guests at the door?

This has real consequence when doing parodies of the show. For a comedy to take a jab at another comedy, you really have to punch hard to make it land. Note that for The Thin Blue Line to make the joke work, Elton had to resort to abuse. I’m not complaining about this; Spitting Image often had to resort to abuse as well. It’s a perfectly legitimate route for comedy. But I think most people weren’t willing to make the joke harsh enough. French and Saunders were.

And so were Enfield and Whitehouse. Yes, our final example of a proper Noel’s House Party parody comes with Smashie and Nicey – the End of an Era, broadcast on the 4th April 1994. It’s Smashie’s Saturday Smiles:

I think my very favourite gag in that sketch is “…here at Hairy Cleft”. It’s a beautiful trick of the mind. Noel’s House Party had Crinkley Bottom, and also had Dangly End… so “Hairy Cleft” is a logical third name. It also just happens to be entirely too rude, and there’s a delightful snap in your brain when it belatedly realises.

Still, other bits of the parody give me pause, at least initially. Noel’s House Party never had long “sad” music beds, and nor did it really have much in the way of over-sexualised dolly birds, at least at that point in the show’s life. I think part of the problem is the sheer look of the thing: Noel’s House Party in its early years had a very specific production design, and End of an Era captures that perfectly. Almost too perfectly: because the parody isn’t really meant as just a Noel’s House Party take-off.

The telling moment is the teardrop medals at the end. That is Hearts of Gold as much as anything⁵, with maybe a dash of Jim’ll Fix It, and thus surely the sketch is intended as a parody of many other entertainment shows into the bargain. Viewed in that light, you start feeling less irritated by the sketch going to different places. But it proves the point that Noel’s House Party was so distinctive, so good, that any parody had to tread a little carefully.

That sketch is easy to misinterpret, because it initially sells itself as Noel’s House Party so convincingly.

*   *   *

End of an Era had another problem with their Noel’s House Party parody. One that none of the other shows I mention above had to deal with.

This Morning With Richard Not Judy was shot with an audience. Ditto with The Fast Show, and French and Saunders. And the audience is such a huge part of Noel’s House Party, and not just in terms of sound. We really need to see them, if we’re going to truly believe a parody of the show.

But End of an Era wasn’t recorded in front of an audience. It’s a documentary parody. How were the team going to make this look and sound convincing?

The obvious answer is to simply use stock footage of an existing audience show, and for years I assumed they had done just that. After all, End of an Era uses shedloads of stock footage elsewhere, in order to portray their wander through decades of British cultural history. Grab some audience shots from another show, shove them in the edit, job done.

Unfortunately, a quick glance at the paperwork leaves us fairly confused. Helpfully, it lists every single bit of stock footage in order, so we can quickly skip to the right part of the programme:

The Band Aid video⁶ and the London Marathon clips are obvious:

And so are the Comic Relief audience shots:

But hang on a minute. The Saturday Smiles sketch comes between the Band Aid video, and the Marathon footage. And the Comic Relief shots aren’t anything to do with the sketch; they’re used later on, for the bit with Angus Deayton. “Tonight we look at a shocking new discovery from the world of dinosaurs…”

What gives? Is the list out of order, and the shots used in Saturday Smiles simply mentioned earlier on? The answer is: no. I went though and identified every piece of footage listed which could conceivably be shots of an audience. There was nothing. This confused me for ages, and I just couldn’t figure out what was going on, except to assume that the paperwork was incomplete in some way.

Until I had a quite remarkable stroke of luck. Step forward Mark Campbell, who dropped the following bomb on Twitter while talking about End of an Era:

“I was in the audience for that, recorded at […] a Ben Elton show. All the audience reactions to that Noel Edmonds pastiche. Harry Enfield came onstage clutching a bit of paper with what he wanted us to do. I remember having to laugh hysterically about an animal being killed or something. Satire!”

This was the second series of Ben Elton’s The Man From Auntie, essentially 30 minutes of Elton stand-up interspersed with a few sketches. Luckily, Mark is the kind of fellow who keeps a diary, so we don’t have to rely on any guesswork here. The recording he went to was on the 2nd February 1994. Let’s take a quick look at the main studio dates for the series:

Studio Pre-records: 15/1/94, 22/1/94
Location: 7/1/94, 10-13/1/94, 21/2/94

A few interesting things come up with the above dates. For a start, yes, the first three episodes of the series really were recorded just the day before transmission, which I think is fairly counter-intuitive for a non-topical comedy show. After that, the show took a break for a week, in order for Crimewatch UK to catch various reprobates; recordings of Auntie continued, however, so the fourth and fifth episodes of the show were recorded a full week before air. The final episode of the series was recorded in the same audience session as the fifth episode, so by the end of the series the show was recorded two weeks ahead.⁷

Mark notes in his diary that he went to see the recording of Auntie on the 2nd February; this was the second episode of the show, transmitted the very next day on the 3rd February 1994.⁸ I personally can’t pick out any individual audience members, but it’s clear from examining both programmes that End of an Era really does use material shot during production of Auntie:

Oddly enough, they do look very similar to the Comic Relief material – that kind of lighting for audiences was clearly in vogue at the time – but they still clearly match up.⁹

Mark’s diary entry also records that Harry Enfield came on at the very end of the recording – “v scruffy and nervous” – to direct the reactions from the audience. The Saturday Smiles sketch wasn’t actually recorded in front of them, nor did they play in the actual sketch itself – this was simply recording audience shots and reactions.

Including, of course, the immortal chant: “He smashed in Chuffy’s brain!”

*   *   *

Which leaves us with just one final thing. Right at the start of this article, I quoted Ben Elton having a jab at Noel’s House Party in The Thin Blue Line. Let’s just take a look at the first episode of the second series of The Man From Auntie; a show based around the idea of “The Ministry of Crap Design”:

BEN ELTON: The Ministry of Crap Design is surely everywhere. There’s no part of our existence into which its tentacles do not intrude. Little pots of UHT cream with a spring hidden inside, so when you open them they explode all over your trousers. Swing doors that open the wrong way, Noel’s House Party, the Ministry is everywhere.

Audience reacts rather too loudly.

BEN ELTON: Oooh, radical stuff! Having a go at Noely, that’ll shake the foundations of society! “He’s lost his edge, I swear it…”¹⁰

I love that Ben Elton slagged off Noel’s House Party in the first episode of his series… and then the recording of the second episode was used to do it all over again.

With thanks to Ian Greaves for archive research, Tanya Jones for extensive editorial advice, and Darrell Maclaine and Mike Scott for useful discussions which inspired the bulk of this article. And thanks again to Mark Campbell, as without him this article would end with an annoying unsolved mystery.

1. It is notable how much the studio audience in The Thin Blue Line enjoys the gag. ↩

2. Although the following isn’t intended as an exhaustive list. ↩

3. The following clip is only about half of the sketch; the full thing lasts over eight minutes. I highly recommend buying the DVD. ↩

4. For the record, I love Noel’s House Party. I also love parodies of Noel’s House Party. You can tell if somebody doesn’t understand comedy if they struggle with this concept. ↩

5. With thanks to @shammountebank on Bluesky for the Hearts of Gold point. ↩

6. Dated incorrectly in the paperwork; they presumably meant 3.1.85 rather than 3.11.85. ↩

7. This isn’t just the wrong dates on the paperwork cut-and-pasted; the tape numbers are also identical to the fifth and sixth episodes, indicating they really were recorded on the same night. ↩

8. The paperwork for End of an Era claims a production schedule of 17th – 28th January 1994; clearly, this isn’t strictly true, although we can presume these were the dates of the main shoot. ↩

9. As one final confirmation that this really was the material used in the final edit, Mark can identify himself in the End of an Era audience shots. ↩

10. Elton immediately turning the joke back on himself here is brilliant. A lesser comedian would incorrectly go in for the kill. Elton realises his joke didn’t actually deserve that much of a reaction from the audience, and compensates accordingly. ↩

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