The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Six: “Boys, I Believe You Like Swearwords”

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

Last time in our look at stock footage in End of an Era, we hung around in the nice clean-cut world of Top of the Pops. Today, Smashie and Nicey throw themselves headlong into… “PUNK!”

This sequence uses only two clips of existing footage… but they just happen to be two of the most interesting clips in the entire show. One of them is extremely well-known. The other, rather less so.

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(24:47) Something Else • BBC2 • TX: 19th January 1980
We’ll deal with the more obscure one first. Where exactly does this concert footage come from, and what is it?

As the strains of “Anarchy in the U.K.” fill the soundtrack, we might be tempted to think that the footage we’re seeing is also of a Sex Pistols concert.¹ A quick examination of the stage disabuses you of that notion. The band is in fact the Ex-Producers, and the song they’re actually dancing to in the original footage is “Newer Wave ’79”. I’ve not been able to nail down a date for the performance, but it’s at famous punk venue The Harp Bar in Belfast, and would have been filmed in late 1979.

And the TV show? Something Else, broadcast on BBC2 between 1978-82, and one of the very first “youth programmes”. There’s sadly not many clips of it online, but I did manage to find this:

Wait, sorry, that’s The Young Ones. Try this:

No, that’s Not the Nine O’Clock News.² Ho ho ho, aren’t I hilarious. Hilarious or not, I am also making a serious point here: so often these kind of shows live on through their parodies, rather than the actual programmes. Comedy survives in the pop culture memory in a way that so many other things don’t.

Happily, in this case we’ve had a stroke of luck. Spit Records did a re-release of some Ex-Producers material back in 2012, and as part of their promotional campaign, they uploaded some rare material to YouTube… including their performance on Something Else.

I’ll let you play “spot the End of an Era shot” for yourselves:

Which leaves us with just one further thing to ponder. When exactly was this material broadcast?

The production paperwork for End of an Era claims it was on the 1st December 1979. BBC Genome has an entry for that date, with the synopsis promising coverage of “the punk scene in Belfast”. However, when I checked, there’s nothing listed in the BBC archives on this date for Something Else at all. Hmmmmmm.

At this point, it’s usually worth checking contemporary newspaper listings, as they will often contain more up-to-date information on schedule changes. Initially, we seem out of luck: The Guardian still thinks the punk edition of Something Else was going out on the 1st December:

5 15 SOMETHING ELSE. The by-teenagers, for-teenagers magazine comes from Belfast this month, with punk, jokes, and more joining sectarian strife on the agenda.

But take a look at this capsule from the following month, on the 19th January 1980:

5 30 SOMETHING ELSE. The last of the series made by young people for their own generation – with Community Programmes Unit aid – is the one from Belfast first scheduled for December 1. They get a second showing on Wednesday night.

So, the programme was postponed from the 1st December 1979, to the 19th January 1980. And sure enough, the BBC’s archives confirm that the programme finally did air on that latter date. But that still leaves the crucial question: why was it postponed in the first place?

At first, my mind wandered towards the content of the show; the first synopsis baldly states it’s going to deal with the political situation in Northern Ireland. It’s not hard to imagine a situation where that could cause some trouble, either because of the news agenda, or simply questions about how the sensitive subject matter was dealt with in the first place. But the actual reason turns out to be far more prosaic.

Here’s a story published in the Sunday Sun on the 2nd December 1979, the day after Something Else was originally due to air. Under the headline “Sport hit in BBC dispute”:

“Armchair sports fans were snookered by the BBC technicians dispute yesterday afternoon.

Racing from Chepstow, boxing from Wembley and Rugby League from Salford were all lost.

And the Coral Professional Snooker Championships, from Preston, disappeared from the screens halfway through.

Last night’s losses were Larry Grayson’s Generation Game and Parkinson from BBC-1 – repeats were shown – and Something Else from BBC-2.”

Ah, a good old-fashioned strike. Of course. A strike which Top of the Pops fans will know all about; it’s the same one which gave us the cut-down episodes of the show featuring existing performances linked together by a DJ out-of-vision.

This strike has caused a great deal of confusion when it comes to this particular episode of Something Else. Not only did End of an Era‘s paperwork get it wrong, but Wikipedia currently lists the original, strikebound date for the show:

1979-12-01 Rudi / The Undertones

I dread to think how many incorrect TX dates litter the internet because of this kind of nonsense.

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(24:59) Today • Thames • TX: 1st December 1976
From one of the more obscure sources of footage in End of an Era, to one of the most famous, despite originally only airing in London. Yes, it’s Bill Grundy acting like a bit of a dickhead on Today.

For years, getting hold of the full interview was tricky; one of the most complete sources was the 2000 Julien Temple documentary The Filth and the Fury, and that was cropped to widescreen. Luckily, the brilliant Thames YouTube account came to our rescue a few years back, and uploaded the entire encounter, minus a performance VT.³

End of an Era of course has the brilliant idea of replacing Grundy with Dave Nice, leading to one of my favourite sequences in the entire show. In fact, on a technical level, I think it might be the best bit of image manipulation in the whole programme. Absolutely flawlessly done. In fact, it works so well that you don’t even notice that the most famous line – “What a fucking rotter!” – isn’t even present in the End of an Era version.

The edit is so carefully constructed from many different sections of the interview that a comparison video would be more irritating than informative. It’s worth looking at the main three camera angles to see how brilliantly the show integrates Nicey, though:

It looks like they recreated the entire wall behind Nicey for this shot, rather than just superimposed Enfield over Grundy; possibly from scratch, as the design of the “today” lettering seems subtly different.⁴ This doesn’t necessarily have to have been a full-size set piece; it could just as easily be a model, or even a Quantel Paintbox job.

Note also that while Nicey’s shirt and tie are different to Grundy’s, the design of the jacket is virtually identical!

The last two images here especially show how absolutely superb the image manipulation work in End of an Era is; Nicey’s even sitting on a different chair design than Grundy, and it all blends together beautifully. You couldn’t do it better in 2024. This was 30 years ago!

The other thing worth noting about the End of an Era edit is the bits of audio dubbing in order to match the reaction to Nicey’s new lines. The most successful is Siouxsie Sioux’s “Oi Nicey, I’ve always wanted to meet you”. Instead of just recording an impersonator saying “Oi Nicey” and then having a mismatch with the rest of the original, the impersonator redubs the entire line, making it all flow naturally.

Less successful is Glen Matlock coming out with a very Paul Whitehouse-sounding “No!”, but you can’t have everything. And if we’re being amazingly picky, watch the End of an Era version again, and look at the cue dot in the top right appearing and disappearing, depending on what part of the interview the footage originally came from. Absolutely outrageous.

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We’re nearly at the end of this series of articles. Join me next time for the final part. Nationwide, Riverside, and a rhino’s hide, who could ask for more?

With thanks to Paul Hayes for researching Something Else in the press, Darrell Maclaine for some useful points regarding the Grundy bluescreen work, Mike Scott for various bits of inspiration, Steve Williams for information about the 1979 strike, and Tanya Jones as my usual unpaid editor.

1. Or “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” and X-Ray Spex, on the commercial VHS release. ↩

2. Hey! Wow! – transmitted as part of the final episode of Not The Nine O’Clock News on the 8th March 1982 – is clearly one of the funniest things in the world. Never have I been more upset to only embed a portion of a sketch here, rather than the whole thing. Blame my over-zealous concerns about “fair dealing”. ↩

3. I always quite liked the SOTCAA idea of repeating the entire edition in full one day, rather than just showing the famous interview, as a way of preserving at least some of the shock effect of the expletives. Sadly, it looks like only the Pistols interview section exists in broadcast quality. ↩

4. Look at the “y” in particular. ↩

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smashie and nicey, the dave nice video show, tx date investigations