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

TV Comedy

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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Battle Plans

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

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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Downtown Toontown

Film

MAROON: Look, Valiant. His wife’s poison, but he thinks she’s Betty Crocker. I want you to follow her. Get me a couple of nice juicy pictures I can wise the rabbit up with.
VALIANT: Forget it. I don’t work Toontown.
MAROON: What’s wrong with Toontown? Every Joe loves Toontown.
VALIANT: Then get Joe to do the job, ’cause I ain’t going.
MAROON: Whoa, feller. You don’t wanna go to Toontown, you don’t have to go to Toontown. Nobody said you had to go to Toontown anyway.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

It’s odd how some deleted scenes seem to take on a life of their own. Some are happily released on DVD and/or Blu-ray, but never end up being discussed much, no matter how interesting. The really obscure ones never even made the leap from LaserDisc. And yet other examples become… is “well-known” an exaggeration? Maybe. But if you’re the kind of person who does more than scrape the surface of a film, you’ll learn about them fairly quickly.

I fancy that Who Framed Roger Rabbit‘s “Pig Head” sequence is more well-known than the average deleted scene. Here’s the short version. After Valiant has hidden Roger at the Terminal Bar, the deleted section has him going back to the Ink and Paint Club to go snooping for Marvin Acme’s will. Here, he’s knocked out by Bongo the Gorilla (in a return appearance), and menaced by Judge Doom and the Weasels. They eventually dump him in Toontown, he gets a pig’s head tooned onto his own in a nasty bit of gang violence, and he ends up washing it off in the shower.1

Here we rejoin the theatrical cut, with Eddie back at his office, and Jessica’s famous “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” scene. Originally, Eddie was meant to be stepping out the shower having just washed his toon head off; instead, the filmmakers dub the sound of a flushing toilet to hide the cut scene. It mostly works, although if you stop and think about it for a moment, you might wonder why Eddie takes his shirt off to go for a dump.

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  1. This, at least, is what was shot. As scripted, there was even more missing at this point, including the funeral of Marvin Acme, and a deleted scene with Eddie wearing the pig’s head on the Red Car. This stuff is interesting and well worthy of discussion, but outside the scope of this post. 

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Flash Frames Redux

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?”

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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Freeze-Frame Gonna Drive You Insane, Part Five

TV Comedy

Part OnePart TwoPart ThreePart FourPart Five

When I started this set of articles about flash frames, right back at the beginning of the year, I never thought it would end up taking five parts to tell this story properly. In particular, I never really wanted to get into the nitty gritty of endless Young Ones repeats.

Unfortunately, as Demosthenes would say: tough shit. It is actually relevant; or, at least, one particular repeat run is. In August 1995, something happened which we can’t entirely avoid. Because not only did The Young Ones begin a fresh, almost-complete run from the start on BBC2… but half the episodes were broadcast in a version never seen before.

“Oil”, “Boring”, and “Bomb” aired in their original, 35 minute versions. “Time” aired in its usual 1985 edit, with the flash frame cut out. But the rest of the episodes aired in brand new 30-minute edits, designed at least partially to make the series easier to repeat by fitting into a standard half hour slot.

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S.P.C.A.

TV Drama

AUGUSTUS: What a gift you Greeks have. Incidentally, the battle, you know: it wasn’t like that. No, not at all. But you described it poetically, I understand that. It was poetic licence. I’m used to that.

I, Claudius, Episode 1, “A Touch of Murder”

Watching I, Claudius for the first time recently was a surprising experience.

It wasn’t surprising because it was great. Of course it was great. Of course it was one of the greatest television shows ever made. I’d been told that for years, I just had to get round to watching it. No, the surprise was in how damn funny it was, an aspect of the show I had somehow managed to avoid being informed about. Which I guess is fairly ignorant regardless; even iPlayer describes it as an “acclaimed blackly comic historical drama series”.

LIVIA: These games are being degraded by the increasing use of professional tricks to stay alive, and I won’t have it. So put on a good show, and there will be plenty of money for the living and a decent burial for the dead.

Brilliant though the show is, initial reviews of the series were predictably mixed. And one review in particular has become somewhat notorious. I first became aware of it from Wikipedia:

“The initial reception of the show in the UK was negative, with The Guardian commenting sarcastically in its first review that ‘there should be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors.'”

This isn’t just an unsourced piece of Wikipedia nonsense; the citation seems reasonable enough. It comes from a November 2012 article in The New York Times, “Imperial Rome Writ Large and Perverse”:

“But looking back wryly weeks ago on the original production, [director] Mr. Wise recalled that it did not seem destined for greatness. In Britain, The Guardian review of “I Claudius,” he said, began, ‘There should be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors.'”

That article thankfully gives the source for all of its quotes from Herbert Wise: “a documentary that accompanies the 35th-anniversary I, Claudius DVD set”. It isn’t too difficult to work out exactly which documentary: it’s I, Claudius: A Television Epic, which was made for the 2002 DVD release of the series.

Certainly The New York Times is quoting Wise more-or-less correctly; here’s what he says in that documentary verbatim:

HERBERT WISE: I remember The Guardian critic – whose name I remember but I won’t quote it now – starting his criticism by saying: “There ought to be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Actors.”

This single quote is responsible for all the repeated anecdotes surrounding our supposed Guardian review. The New York Times article itself is syndicated everywhere for a start, but it’s spread well beyond that. For instance, in April 2022, The New European ran a piece called “The show that started a TV toga party”:1

“The show was a modest ratings hit for BBC2 (averaging an audience of around 2.5 million an episode), but reviews were initially dismissive, with The Guardian snottily proclaiming: “There should be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors.” But I, Claudius was soon re-evaluated and won greater popularity with repeat transmissions, as well as three Baftas.”

The line has also started to make into books; Arthur J. Pomeroy’s A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen (Wiley, 2017) directly quotes Wise:

“Herbert Wise remembered the Guardian critic “starting his criticism by saying ‘There ought to be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors'” (I, Claudius: A Television Epic, 2002).”

And coming right up to date, in August 2023 the Socialist Worker published the article “Roman history made into classic TV viewing”:

“Initially critics tore it apart. “It was so badly received in its first two weeks,” recalled Sian Phillips, who played Livia, “because it was so different.” The Guardian – which now says it is a masterpiece – ­loftily proclaimed, ‘There should be a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors.'”

Here’s the problem: The Guardian said nothing of the damn sort.

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  1. Though the URL seems to indicate it was originally called “How I, Claudius Kickstarted Game of Thrones”. The original headline is better. 

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“The Most Disgusting Thing I’ve Ever Seen”

Film

“The finished movie we see on the screen is often far different from the director’s original conception. The Cutting Room Floor is the intriguing study of the wounds, bruises, Band-Aids, and sometimes miracle remedies that can often improve a film… or destroy it.”

— Back page blurb for The Cutting Room Floor

“Trust me!”

— Rudy Russo, Used Cars

Determining cause and effect when it comes to teenage reading is a tricky thing. Did Laurent Bouzereau’s The Cutting Room Floor (Citadel Press, 1994) inspire my interest in deleted and alternate scenes in film and television? Or was I obsessed with them before picking up the book, which is why I grabbed it from the shelf in the first place?

I think there is a healthy dose of the former in this case, which makes it a very special book for me. Regardless, it’s a wonderful piece of work, and one which I find myself returning to again and again every few years. These days, with a combination of DVD extras and the right websites, much of this information is easier to access than it used to be. But back in 1994, especially for poor sods like me who hadn’t got a hope of getting a LaserDisc player, books like this were how you found out about this stuff.

There are so many tales of cut material which I first read about in that book, and stuck in my head immediately. The different edits of Basic Instinct for one; the attempted rescue of Exorcist II: The Heretic for another. But for sheer childish fun, you can’t beat the following tale about Used Cars, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s satirical black comedy.1

Bob Gale: “The only thing that got cut out of Used Cars never got to preview. It was something that the studio insisted that we change in the scene when the car salesmen do a commercial at a football game wearing Groucho Marx glasses. The propman on the film had found these glasses that instead of having a fake nose had a penis for it. We thought that was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen, and we thought to ourselves, you know, these car salesmen, that’s exactly the kind of things they would do. So we shot the scene with these glasses. When we sent the dailies to Columbia Pictures, I got this call from the head of production just ripping me apart for putting these pornographic images in the movie. How could we possibly do this? Had we lost our minds? This has gone beyond the grounds of taste. I got my head handed to me on a platter about this.

Columbia was outraged about this scene. I kept telling them to wait until they saw the scene cut together. I got on an airplane [the movie was shot in Phoenix] and screened the scene for Columbia. Frank Price [the head of the studio at the time], who by the way I have absolute admiration and respect for, turned around and said, ‘It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. You have to redo this.’ And so we reshot the scene with normal Groucho glasses. However, if you have access to the videotape or the laserdisc and you single-frame through the sequence, you’ll see there is still one shot in that sequence where one of the guys is wearing a set of dick-nose glasses. In fact, an actual image of that was in one of the TV spots. It was one of the laughs that we had on the TV censors! It was only a few frames, but it was on national television.”

This tale stuck in my head, long before I ever watched Used Cars. And when did I finally get round to watching Used Cars? Erm, last month. Hey, it only took nearly two decades. There are other films listed in that book that I still haven’t got round to yet.

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  1. Although with character names like “Roy L. Fuchs”, it’s as much Carry On as anything else. 

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