The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Four: “Lovely Bouncy Bristols”

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four • Part Five • Part Six • Part Seven

There comes a time in every project like this where you run into a problem. There’s always some damn piece of the puzzle which you can’t quite put together. The bit which makes you question why you even bothered writing this nonsense in the first place, when you could do something relaxing like snowboarding. Or BASE jumping.

With End of an Era, the sticking point isn’t really surprising, if you give it more than a moment’s consideration. It’s the section featuring the handover between Smashie and Nicey, in the early days of Radio Fab:

This sequence contains 22 intermingled stock footage shots, from no less than four different sources. Two of those sources are easily identified. The other two are not. Frankly, the whole thing has been driving me slightly loopy.

No matter. Let’s start with what we know first.

*   *   *

(17:52) Arena, “Caroline 199 – A Pirate’s Tale” • BBC2 • TX: 1st March 1991
It seems somehow inevitable that this documentary would turn up at some point. If you were making a mock documentary about radio of this era, wouldn’t a relatively recent Arena about Radio Caroline be an obvious source of footage?

A full seven shots in the handover sequence were originally sourced from this documentary, all of them focusing on people listening to the radio in various contexts:

The ironic thing about this sequence is that in Arena, these shots are used to portray people listening to pirate radio; in End of an Era, we’ve left pirate radio behind, and they’re used to show people listening to good old legal Radio Fab.

To tackle the obvious question: where did Arena originally source these clips from? Sadly, the paperwork for this edition is fairly dire when it comes to listing its archive sources. The first three shots seem to come from Granada; the second three come from ITN, and the last one seems to be Granada again. Beyond that, there’s no other information at all; absolutely no specific programmes mentioned. Brilliant, thank you Arena, well done.

(18:16) Europa • BBC2 • TX: 21st September 1972
Hang on, Europa? What the hell’s that?

This is now one of the most obscure programmes used as a source of material for End of an Era, despite airing on BBC2 for eight years between 1966-74. In fact, it’s very difficult to find out any information about it at all, beyond Radio Times billings. The most evocative description I can find is for this 1970 edition:

“ZDF… ORTF… RAI… SRG… JRT… a bewildering variety of initials that to people living on the other side of the Channel means the television service of their own country.

They all contribute to Europa. For wherever there is a story the film crews of our television colleagues on the Continent are there reporting and commenting.

Or in other words: how can the Beeb fill a cheap slot on BBC2? By using foreign reports, with the odd bit of extra contextualisation by Derek Hart. Actually, I can’t bring myself to be too sarcastic about this; I’d love the BBC to do something similar now.

End of an Era uses material from one particular 1972 episode, titled “Britain As She Is”:

“A Yugoslav television report quotes Casanova: ‘Nothing in England resembles the rest of Europe. Even the earth is different. Everything there has peculiar properties, the people, male and female, the cattle, the fish…’ It’s still true, according to the Yugoslavs, who are also a little puzzled to find the British so cheerful.

Film from Television Ljubljana, in Yugoslavia, starts a new series of documentary reports on the European scene as presented by television networks in West and East Europe.”

In short, this means: a load of shots taken of young people on Kings Road. But what’s this? The original report was in colour; End of an Era turns the pictures black and white!

We last saw this trick on the closing credits of Hi-de-Hi!, where the images from the holiday camps were desaturated to make them feel more in keeping with the era. (However inaccurate that was historically.) Here, colour material from 1972 is changed to black and white, in order to make it feel more like the 60s.

To be fair, it makes a little more sense here than with Hi-de-Hi, where the material was still intended to be newsreel footage. Colour television was only introduced in the UK in 1967, and that was only BBC2; BBC1 remained in black and white until 1969, and some regional programmes stayed black and white well into the 70s. End of an Era is presumably intending this to be news footage from 1967, the year Radio Fab launched: it would be black and white.

*   *   *

Unfortunately, we now run into problems. I can’t actually identify where the rest of the footage in this sequence comes from.

Oh, I can tell you what the paperwork claims. Apparently, some of it is from Nationwide, broadcast on the 4th June 1973. Well, none of the existing material for that edition of the show contains any shots used in End of an Era.¹ I also checked the 6th April 1973, in case there had been an obvious typo in the paperwork. Again, nothing.

The other source of footage for this sequence is even less helpfully labelled; it’s simply listed as “Kings Road Stock”², with no TX date attached. It took a bit of thinking to work this out, because I’m a bit stupid: it isn’t stock footage from King’s Road, it’s stock footage of King’s Road. Stuff merely taken from a library, rather than a finished programme.

Sadly, this leaves us with a fair few shots that – at least right now – I simply can’t identify. If we could figure out exactly which shots were from Nationwide, then the remaining “Kings Road Stock” footage would magically reveal itself. As it is, the unidentified shots are going to be an irritating jumble of the two:

The date is almost certainly wrong on the paperwork for the Nationwide footage, but figuring out exactly what the right date is may be impossible. But dear reader, I’m sure if anybody can do it, it’s you. DO MY WORK FOR ME.

That’s quite enough for now. Join me next time, where we leave the seedy world of young women in tight tops walking down the street, and instead investigate the seedy world of young women in tight tops standing around in a TV studio. “How old are you, m’darlin’?”

With thanks to Darrell Maclaine and Mike Scott for various bits of inspiration, Milly Storrington for archive research, and Tanya Jones as my usual unpaid editor.

1. That edition does, however, have include very amusing report. ↩

2. Without the apostrophe. ↩

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smashie and nicey, the dave nice video show