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Hot 97

Published 5th March 2024

Jingles / Radio / TV Comedy

Over the last month and a half, I have been bulk-watching Seinfeld. Is it healthy to watch 128 episodes and counting in that time? Probably not, but right now I don’t feel like watching any other comedy show ever again.

But that’s not the topic of today’s post. Take a look at the following from “The Pool Guy”, which first aired in the US on the 16th November 1995. Kramer, for reasons best known to Kramer, is busy impersonating a film information line.

KRAMER: Hello. And welcome to Moviefone. Brought to you by The New York Times and Hot 97. Coming to theatres this Friday: Kevin Bacon, Susan Sarandon… “You’ve got to get me over that mountain! No!” There’s no higher place than Mountain High. Rated R.

And my ears pricked up. Hot 97. Why did that radio station mean something to me? After all, I’ve never lived in New York. And it’s not one of the especially well-known stations for radio geeks, like WABC.

Answer: because I remember a jingle for that station. But not just any jingle.

You see, Hot 97 wasn’t always called Hot 97. It used to be called Hot 103, and was owned by Emmis Communications. In 1988, Emmis bought WYNY 97.1 from NBC, and at the time, FCC regulations prevented a single company from owning two FM stations in the same market. Emmis thus decided to sell its old frequencies, and move its radio stations to the new ones.

I fully admit I had to look up some of the in-depth information above. But I already remembered the broad details: Hot 103 became Hot 97. And why did I know this?

Because on the 18th November 2018, I heard a segment on Jon Wolfert’s Rewound Radio show, where he plays lots of classic radio jingles. This particular segment was about how Hot 103 promoted its frequency change to Hot 97.

Yeah, here’s how. No Gloria, it’s not 1-2-3, it’s…

I only had to hear that jingle once, and it stuck in my head instantly. To the point where, more than five years later, a passing reference in Seinfeld brought it all right back. “Oh yeah, Hot 97 used to be Hot 103…”

I’m not entirely sure anybody can afford to sneer at jingles right now. Traditional broadcasting is in enough trouble as it is, without turning their nose up at marketing which patently works. It even grabs people out of time, where the actual message it’s getting across is completely irrelevant.

Hot 103 is moving down to 97, guys.

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Canon.

Published 4th March 2024

TV Comedy

Here’s one thing which mildly irritates me. When I get round to watching an old film or comedy show which I haven’t seen before, and I decide to talk about it on whatever social media platform I’m not sulking with at the time, I sometimes get the magic words:

“What, you’ve never watched that? How?!”

The easy answer is: I often go deep, not wide. I spend so much of my time researching and writing ludicrous, never-before-published nonsense about The Young Ones and similar. I ain’t got time to watch everything a sensible person does.

The grumpy answer is: OK, have you ever seen [a cool show that not nearly enough people have watched]? No? WELL I HAVE, NOW LEAVE ME ALONE.

But the hard answer is: I seriously want to push back on the idea that there’s any kind of canon that anybody is “supposed” to have watched. There is no such thing. I can’t think of anything more tedious than watching film or television by rote. Surely the best way to destroy Fawlty Towers is to blink quizzically at people who haven’t yet had the pleasure.

The joy is in our own personal route through a world of fun things, not a bizarre expectation that everyone who lived through a certain decade have all watched the same thing. Some of us were busy.

*   *   *

Anyway, I’m currently watching Seinfeld for the first time, and I finally know what comedy is.

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Battle Plans

Published 24th February 2024

TV Comedy

Last month, I wrote about the 1993 Red Dwarf script book Primordial Soup, and how it gave us a little insight into the production of “Psirens”.

But there’s plenty else of interest in that book. I always rather liked the introduction Grant Naylor wrote for it; an introduction which is sadly missing from the version uploaded to the Internet Archive. My copy is currently lost in a house move, so many thanks to Dan Cooper for sending me a few snaps. It’s just as much fun to read as it was all those years ago.

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Smashie’s Saturday Smiles

Published 21st February 2024

TV Comedy

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?

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

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Smashie and Nicey – the End of an Era: Music Guide

Published 11th February 2024

TV Comedy

Nicey listening to music on headphones

What exactly is Smashie and Nicey – the End of an Era?

One of the endless joys of the show is that it’s many things. A parody of a certain kind of DJ, of course. Also a pastiche of a certain kind of documentary. But it’s also a trawl through decades of British light entertainment: a macrocosm of a particular strand of British culture.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the show is absolutely stuffed to the gills with music, of all different kinds. Some of them obvious, others obscure. Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody sat and worked out exactly where everything came from?

What, you want me to do it? Fine.

All times given are for the broadcast version of the show, although I’ve also noted any significant music changes made for the extended VHS edit. For any music which is taken from archive footage, I’ve provided very minimal details here; a companion article detailing all the stock footage used in the show is in the works.

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A Proper Comedy Fan

Published 18th January 2024

Life / Radio Comedy / TV Comedy

I’m supposed to have grown up with radio comedy, you know. More specifically, I’m supposed to have grown up with a radio underneath my bedclothes. Ideally listening to Blue Jam, if I had been particularly with it.

I wasn’t, so I didn’t. Oh, I just about managed a Hitchhiker’s repeat, at some point in the 90s. Beyond that, there was a whole world out there which I just didn’t bother with. If the best pictures were from radio, I wasn’t really interested in them.

The obvious question is why, and I think the answer is one of love, rather than hate. I didn’t hate radio comedy; I simply didn’t listen to it. No, my love was for the telly. I distinctly remember recording every single episode of the nineties repeats of Fawlty Towers off-air; perhaps that was the start of my love of archive television, but it didn’t feel like archive television back then. It was just TV. And I loved TV. Especially sitcoms, sketch shows, and game shows.

But surely, even if I didn’t listen to radio comedy, I at least listened to the Top 40 and stuff? Not really. The radio was on at various points, but it wasn’t really my thing. My things were obvious and comfortable: when it wasn’t television, it was my computer, a BBC Master.1 Endless time spent playing games, or programming, or writing silly things on it.

I think, when I was younger, I needed visuals. That’s how I interacted with the world. Something to look at. I watched and loved The Day Today; it wasn’t that I hated On The Hour, it just wasn’t on my radar.

So when, in the early 2000s, I found a forum online, and saw everyone talking about radio comedy… I was slightly nonplussed. That’s what I was supposed to have been doing?

Nonplussed, and inadequate. I wasn’t a proper comedy fan. Damn.

*   *   *

Fast-forward to some undetermined day in the 2010s. I’m watching the bonus features on the Series 1 DVD of That Mitchell and Webb Look. And in the Making Of documentary, David Mitchell suddenly says the following:

“We’d always wanted to be on TV, ‘cos that’s where I got into comedy really, watching TV. Growing up, watching Blackadder, and Monty Python, and that kind of thing. So yeah, I’d like to say I grew up listening to Radio 4 and The Goon Show and that kind of thing, and I did have a few tapes of The Goon Show, but basically it was TV, so I’ve always wanted to be on TV. That in my own head, is where successful comedians are.”2

I grin. Because that’s me. I wasn’t stupid after all. Somebody who is very, very, very funny felt exactly the same as I had.

And that’s how a heterosexual white male can still experience that unexpected rush of feeling represented.

  1. Better than a BBC Micro. ↩

  2. It’s worth paying attention to exactly what Mitchell says there. He doesn’t say that successful comedians are on television rather than radio; he clearly says “in my own head”. It’s not actually true, and he knows it. He’s talking about feelings, not facts, and carefully flags it as such. ↩

Flash Frames Redux

Published 12th January 2024

TV Comedy

Having spent an entire year writing about flash frames in The Young Ones, you really would think I was done with the whole damn thing now. And I nearly am, I promise.

However, I have one last thing to talk about. Let’s watch the first couple of minutes of “Boring”, broadcast on the 23rd November 1982.

Here’s a fun fact which I don’t think has ever been mentioned before: the entire house sequence above, up to and including “Morning has broken”, was originally supposed to be placed before the opening titles, according to the camera script. It’s probably a good idea this was changed; Neil’s line is funny as a stupid throwaway, but placing it just before the titles would give it a weight it simply couldn’t support.

Right, enough fun, back to the flash frames. At 1:25 in the above video, something rather odd happens. We get this image, of a flying carpet, for a single frame:1

A flying rug in the hallway

What’s going on? Despite this being from Series 1, is this related to the whole Series 2 flash frames business?

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  1. Tech note: it’s a single frame in that video, deinterlacing the original material to 50fps. In fact, it was a single field in the original interlaced material. ↩

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“What Is the Function of This Illusion?”

Published 10th January 2024

TV Comedy

1. Model Shot
Starfield. We pan to reveal enormous sun. After a pause, Starbug beetles across the disc of the sun.

2. Int. Obs. Deck
Dark. Various consoles click into life as we pan round the room, and come to rest on two deep sleep units. Suddenly, one of them flares with blue light from inside, and its hood hisses back, revealing a slowly-waking LISTER, wearing soiled long johns. He sits up. His mouth tastes vile. He notices his fingernails and toenails are six inches long. LISTER pads across the room, and starts to cut his nails in a desk-mounted pencil sharpener. He catches his reflection in a blank TV screen.

LISTER: (To his reflection) Who the hell are you?

Red Dwarf, “Psirens”, Primordial Soup

The Red Dwarf episode “Psirens” was first broadcast on BBC2 on the 7th October 1993. But that’s not how a lot of Red Dwarf fans first experienced the episode. Or specifically, how they first read it.

Because in March 1993, the first Red Dwarf script book, Primordial Soup was published. This contained the scripts for the episodes “Polymorph”, “Marooned”, “Dimension Jump”, “Justice”, “Back to Reality”, and… erm, “Psirens”. Seven months before it was broadcast. Not exactly how you’d choose to reveal the first episode of a brand new series, especially one with an intriguing format change: the crew left adrift on Starbug.

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The Dirty Feed Christmas Message 2023

Published 25th December 2023

TV Comedy

“This is ‘And The Grass Won’t Pay No Mind’ by Elvis Presley. I didn’t really love Elvis. Elvis wasn’t my person. But a friend of mine said ‘Wait, you gotta listen to it’, and I remember this song was like, when it clicked for me what people were hearing in it…

I don’t know if anything beats a friend, or someone you respect, saying like: try it again. You’ve missed it. Try it again.”

– Greta Gerwig, Desert Island Discs

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Balls.

Published 23rd December 2023

TV Comedy

Every so often, there’s a comment on this site which deserves a wider audience. Today, it’s Rob Blackmon, asking this question on The Young Ones, “Interesting”:

“Finally, if anyone has access to shooting scripts or otherwise, what was it that Mike was clearly about to say after “Cinderella” entered the flat? Such an obvious, jarring cut and he just gave us that look, like.”

It certainly is one of the most obvious and clunky edits in the whole of The Young Ones. Here’s a reminder:

It is indeed very clear that Mike is about to say something, and we rudely cut away. But what, exactly?

I do, in fact, have access to the script. And the bon mot we were so cruelly deprived of is the following:

CINDERS: I’m looking for my prince.
MIKE: (POINTING UPSTAIRS) Maybe they’re upstairs with my etchings baby. (TO CAMERA) At least I didn’t make a joke about balls or fairy queens.

Certainly not a joke worth keeping. Although what’s vaguely annoying is that if they’d cut away from Mike a second earlier, before he’d had a chance to start looking at the camera, the moment would be far less jarring.

Yes, next year on Dirty Feed, expect more lectures about editing in sitcoms from 1982.

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