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The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Seven: “Well Nationwide Did!”

TV Comedy

Part OnePart TwoPart ThreePart FourPart FivePart SixPart Seven

Welcome to the final part of my series of articles looking at stock footage in Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era. Something which was meant to only be a single piece, then two, and eventually ballooned to seven. Yet again, why nobody ever wrote about this before became clear as soon as I started the damn thing.

So let’s stagger gasping and sweaty across the finish line. This is a grab bag of all the remaining bits of stock footage in the show, mostly from the second half. And surely the climax of this series of articles is the best time to highlight a few of my CRITICAL RESEARCH FAILURES.

Such as:

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

TV Comedy

Part OnePart TwoPart ThreePart FourPart FivePart 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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The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Five: “I’ve Just Eaten a Whole Packet of Toffos!”

TV Comedy

Part OnePart TwoPart ThreePart FourPart Five • Part SixPart Seven

At last, something easy with this series of articles looking at stock footage in Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era. Surely Top of the Pops has been endlessly watched and documented by now. I’ll fly through this, won’t I?

No? Oh well.

End of an Era features material from six different editions of Top of the Pops, from title sequences through to actual performances. All but the last two clips can be seen in the following:

Note that I have conveniently decided to stop that video just before the pair’s “celebration” of “black music”. “You would not believe the complaints that show got…” Or, indeed, websites.

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The Ballad of SKP003375

Meta / TV Comedy

Warning: the following is for hardcore TV research nerds only.

The most complicated series of articles I’ve ever written here on Dirty Feed is probably last year’s five-part epic on The Young Ones and flash frames. It’s the kind of project which has you waking up in a cold sweat at night, screaming about /72 edits.

It’s also a project which I think turned out OK. Sure, I may not have got to the root of every single question to do with those damn flash frames, but I got closer than anybody has before, and that’s surely worth something. It certainly manages to be more accurate than most newspaper reports from the time.

Of those remaining questions, though, one of them really bugs me. It’s regarding these two flash frames from “Nasty”, first transmitted on the 29th May 1984:

Pottery wheel
Dripping tap


Despite how much I poked at them, and how much other people poked at them for me, I never managed to figure out the original source for these frames. I mean, I tried. I really, really tried. I even ended up looking through programmes about sodding pottery that the BBC broadcast in the early 80s. No luck. What programme did those two shots originate from?

The only clue we have is the following sentence in the paperwork for “Nasty”:

Flash frame of tap dripping from K065402 transferred to H25992, and Potter’s Wheel from SKP003375 transferred to H25992.

There are three spools, aka tapes, mentioned in that sentence. H25992 is the spool which all the flash frames in the series was compiled onto, before they were scattered across the various episodes. But K065402 and SKP003375, the original source of the frames, seemed impossible to track down. No current BBC database – at least any that I know if – seems to recognise those tape numbers. Which is a bizarre state of affairs in itself. Nor did anybody seem to know what those spool prefixes actually meant.

I came up with all kinds of theories, mind. Did “K” stand for TK, or Telecine? Is SKP “Scotland Telecine”? Was I, in fact, going completely mad?

Such thoughts eventually faded. I finally finished the series of articles, made a half-hearted promise that I’d investigate more next year, and that was that. Meanwhile, this year’s long project is an investigation into all the stock footage used in Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era. And my latest post is on material of lovely young ladies walking down the street, used as part of the sequence on Radio Fab’s DJ handover.

And one of the sources of those lovely young ladies is listed as the following in the paperwork:

Kings Road Stock.
7 secs
SKP2304
BBC

And suddenly, something clicked into place. This was footage taken from an actual stock library, rather than a finished programme. And it had the number SKP2304. The potter’s wheel footage from “Nasty” had the number SKP003375. The “SK” in “SKP” surely stands for “Stock”, and that potter’s wheel footage surely came from a stock library too. It’s quite possible it had never been broadcast before The Young Ones used it.

Of course, questions remain. I say it’s possible it had “never have been broadcast before”, but the emphasis is on “possible”; just because The Young Ones took it from a stock library, its ultimate origin may still have been from a broadcast programme. My only point is that it’s not guaranteed to have done so. And the “K” prefix for the dripping tap material is still up for debate.

I might figure this out in 30 years, you know.

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

TV Comedy

Part OnePart TwoPart ThreePart Four • Part FivePart SixPart 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.

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The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Three: “DJ Overboard, There”

TV Comedy

Part OnePart TwoPart Three • Part FourPart FivePart SixPart Seven

So far in our analysis of stock footage in End of an Era, we’ve seen Nicey meeting The Beatles and appearing on Blue Peter, and Smashie hamming his way through Dixon of Dock Green and Z-Cars. It’s all that kind of nonsense which sticks in the memory with the programme: big, showy, attention-grabbing comedy.

There’s a couple more sequences like that later on. But for now, we turn to the more prosaic use of stock footage in the show. How does the series portray Smashie and Nicey’s early days on pirate Radio Geraldine? Did they just grab a load of 60s footage of Radio Caroline?

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The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Two: “I’d Be Delighted, Sir”

TV Comedy

Part OnePart Two • Part ThreePart FourPart FivePart SixPart Seven

When we last left our look at stock footage in Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era, we had just seen Nicey’s first steps into showbusiness. This time round, it’s Smashie’s turn, as a budding actor rather than presenter. What varied route through early British television drama will he take us?

Cop-tastic.

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

TV Comedy

Part One • Part TwoPart ThreePart FourPart FivePart SixPart 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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Smashie’s Saturday Smiles

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

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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