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The Dave Nice Video Show, Part One: “A 60s Version of The Word”

Published 17th March 2024

TV Comedy

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

NICEY: Freddie was my most glorious introduction to pop. I remember the morn after the show, I got up and looked at myself in the mirror and said: “Mate, you’re a great bloke. You really are a great bloke. Open your gorgeous eyes and look. Pop’s here. Look, I pondered to myself, look, you great big beautiful blue-eyed lovely man. You were put ‘pon this earth to be one of the world’s great philosophers. To teach people about the meaning-of-life-type stuff. To show ’em how to make a curious sense of this crazy-world-in-which-we-live-in-type scenario. With pop as your vehicle1, you can speak to the nation. For that is your purpose.”

Nicey belches.

What is the most memorable part of Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era?

I would argue the show sets out its stall early on. Firstly, there’s the glimpse of Dave Nice seamlessly dancing with Freddie Garrity on Blue Peter. This is followed shortly afterwards by Nicey blatantly hitting on Paul McCartney during an interview. If End of an Era had provided nothing of interest but those two scenes, it would still have earned its place in comedy history. A perfect blend of archive footage, and brand new material, fused together to form comedy nirvana.

But where does the archive footage in these scenes originally come from? Surely we can do better than “a 60s episode of Blue Peter” and “footage of a Beatles concert”? Yes. Yes, we can. Much better.

All timings given are from the broadcast version of End of an Era, although I’ve tried hard to give enough video reference here that you shouldn’t need to find whatever dodgy copy you have of it.

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  1. Mere text cannot quite convey how Harry Enfield pronounces this word. ↩

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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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Commonness.

Published 3rd March 2024

Animation / Life / TV Presentation

Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (2003):

“Walt Disney’s Snow White has virtues – of kindness and compassion and maternal love – that the Queen never had; she will win a victory of some sort over age, with a beauty of spirit if not of the flesh. Disney thus introduced a note of hope and love into a very stark, elemental story, without violating that story’s basic structure. To do that, he had to deal directly with emotions that most of us are reluctant to express, lest we be embarrassed by their very commonness.”

Those emotions are at their height, of course, in the scene where the Dwarfs mourn Snow White’s apparent death near the very end of the film.

Barrier goes on to quote I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929):

“…these thoughts and feelings, in part because of their significance and their nearness to us, are peculiarly difficult to express without faults of tone. If we are forced to express them we can hardly escape pitching them in a key which ‘overdoes’ them, or we take refuge in an elliptic mode of utterance hinting them rather than rendering them to avoid offence either to others or to ourselves.”

*   *   *

Today marks ten years since I started my job in BBC presentation. Ten years of directing BBC One and BBC Two, among the BBC’s other domestic channels.

And I think back to my Dad. He died thirty years ago, in 1994. I was just 13. We were just beginning to have the vague stirrings of an adult-adult relationship… and then he was gone. We never truly got to know each other.

But he loved television. I remember him watching, long into the evening, well into the night. And I really, really hope he would have been proud of me.

The specifics might be different, but such feelings are common. They are embarrassingly common, exactly as Barrier describes. You can’t help but wish you had a more original thought. But some of our most important thoughts are some of the least original things in the world.

Such as: thirty years on, I still miss him.

An early version of this post was first published in the January issue of my monthly newsletter.

“Are You OK With This?”

Published 28th February 2024

Internet

Jason Kottke, 21st December 2023:

“Substack explains why they are paying Nazis to publish on their platform. Friends who publish on Substack, are you ok with this? If not, maybe try Buttondown or WordPress or Ghost or literally anything fucking else.”

Greg Storey, 27th February 2024:

“Tumblr and WordPress user data have been sold to train AI, and Automattic intends to do it again moving forward. Content posted on both platforms between 2014 and 2023 was shared without user’s permission. Even worse, the data exchanged included private and deleted posts, private answers, and “content from premium partner blogs” for clients like Apple. […]

If you’re using Tumblr or WordPress it’s time to seriously consider moving on to software made by companies with more integrity. Any integrity frankly is better than what you have now. I can’t say enough about Ghost, Kirby, and Craft.”

*   *   *

It doesn’t matter what I actually think about the above two issues. I’ve come to believe that Substack’s Nazi problem was at least a little overblown, and I’d need to research the WordPress issue more thoroughly before coming to any kind of conclusion. But it’s all kinda irrelevant.

Instead, let’s take a hypothetical example. Some poor soul is running a newsletter on Substack. They read about all the Nazi stuff in December, and try to do the right thing: so they move to a self-hosted WordPress installation, as Jason recommends above. All sorted, right?

Only to now be told this month by someone else that, sorry, you backed the wrong horse. Don’t go with WordPress, they’re the bad guys.

That’s two moves, in the space of two months. I guess our hypothetical person could move again… but will the next service they choose turn out to be the bad guys too? How long will it be before that happens? A month, two months, maybe a whole year?

How long do they get to spend writing, before the tedious admin kicks in again?

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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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Steve Wright (1954–2024)

Published 13th February 2024

Radio

Back in 2011, The Mirror published a hit piece on Steve Wright. I’m not going to link to it, and I’m not going to extensively quote from it. Indeed, you may wonder why I’d even bring it up on the day his death has been announced.

I’ll just give you the short version: they called him a fat loner.

It was obviously deeply unpleasant. But I wondered: how was he going to deal with is on his next Radio 2 show? Make a big thing of it, and you look weird and over-sensitive, despite how nasty it was. Maybe it’s best to ignore it entirely… but that’s a little weird too. Elephants in the room are bad things, whether you’re responsible for the elephant or not.

So I tuned in, wondering what he was going to do. The opening music starts up, the big cheer. Steve introduces himself, as usual. Then a pause.

And then, muttered under his breath: “I’m so lonely…”

Then on with the show.

Perfect.

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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