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

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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(9:55) Dixon of Dock Green, “The Rotten Apple” • BBC TV • TX: 11th August 1956
Here it is. The single oldest piece of stock footage in End of an Era, and by some considerable margin. In fact, it’s so old that the production have to cheat.

To be fair, it’s a fool’s errand to try and make all these clips fit an exact timeline. End of an Era is essentially alternative history; it doesn’t need to fit our timeline perfectly. More prosaically, whatever else End of an Era is doing, it is very much in the market for boffo laffs, and strict adherence to exact years was never going to be the best way of providing them.

Still, every single other clip which introduces Smashie and Nicey in this section of the programme dates between 1962-64. This clip of Dixon of Dock Green is the outlier; a full six years earlier than anything else. But the problem with using such a old clip is that the pop culture memory had already started to fade, even by 1994.

In the clip above, End of an Era uses the famous Dixon of Dock Green theme tune, “An Ordinary Copper”. But that’s not what’s in the original episode. The original theme to the show, long forgotten by most, was a whistled version of “Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner”:

End of an Era is rewriting history here, as ever… but in a rather different way than it usually does. We’re usually supposed to spot where the history has been rewritten, and enjoy the joke which that gap now creates. Here, it’s doing so invisibly, in order to bolster other jokes. The programme needs to instantly set the scene for Smashie’s shenanigans in Dixon-land, and it does so by invoking the famous theme tune. Which also, of course, makes a 1956 episode of the show really feel like the 60s.

The question has to be asked: why did End of an Era choose such an old episode of the show in the first place? Why didn’t it just pick an episode from the mid-sixties instead? I think there are at least two reasons. For a start, the survival rate for Dixon of Dock Green is piss-poor; 33 episodes exist in full out of a total of 432, including just six episodes from the whole of the 60s.¹

But more importantly: there are extremely good comedic reasons for choosing “The Rotten Apple”. Enfield and Whitehouse clearly saw some delightful things they could do with this episode. Let’s take a look. As before, all audio here is taken from the original episode of Dixon, as this helps clarify at least one brilliant joke.

As per the material with Nicey in the last article, one striking thing about End of an Era is that even before our hero has been added into the picture, the footage has been re-edited so things happen in a different order; Smashie’s entrance behind Arthur Rigby happens after his main line.

The closer you investigate how End of an Era used footage like this, the cleverer it appears. Of course, there’s the fabulous transformation of Jack Warner’s movement in the doorway, turned from a perfectly natural bit of acting, into Smashie knocking against him. But it’s only when examining the original footage that you can appreciate the use of the shot focused on Jack Warner, with Rigby’s dialogue in the background. By removing the audio of Rigby, the production gives space for Smashie to get out his “scars in the sty” line.

But the absolute best thing about this clip is that we can now hear that the crash as Smashie drops the crockery is on the original footage, and it’s this original crash which causes Rigby to stumble over his line!² Which is brilliant. And thoroughly worth using an episode six years out of time for.

It’s perhaps worth mentioning that three years earlier, on the 26th August 1991, “The Rotten Apple” was repeated as part of BBC2’s Lime Grove Day, commemorating the closure of those famous studios. I’d be wary of attributing anything particularly concrete to this, although much like the previous article, fantasies of Enfield and Whitehouse watching at home and laughing their heads off at the crash are incredibly tempting.

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(10:34) Z-Cars, “Four of a Kind” • BBC TV • TX: 2nd January 1962
No timeline cheats are necessary for Z-Cars, and this clip is taken from the very first episode of the show. Again, all audio in the below video is from the original episode.

There is a little less to say about this section, although it’s worth noting Smashie’s very amusing extra dialogue added to the opening wide shot: “Alright you perisher, come with me in the car.” As close to Mr. Cholmondley-Warner as End of an Era gets.

Notably, in this clip Smashie is replacing a real person, rather than bumbling round the edges of the picture: James Ellis as Bert Lynch. We can perhaps imagine that Smashie was sacked after this opening episode, and Ellis brought in.³ One thing which does become clear on watching the original footage is that they actually bothered compositing Whitehouse into the original background occupied by Ellis on the reverse shot. They could quite easily have cheated and used any old background, and nobody would have been any the wiser.

Despite the technical challenge posed by these sequences, End of an Era is still thinking and directing comedically. Frank Windsor’s “How’d you like to join it?” is in-vision originally, but End of an Era doesn’t cut back to him: it keeps him out of shot, so we feel the full impact of Smashie’s face freezing. A life falling apart in real time. Now that’s comedy.

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(10:58) Doctor Who, “An Unearthly Child” • BBC TV • TX: 23rd November 1963
Yes, the very first episode of Doctor Who, and the key section at the end of the episode where we take our first real trip in the TARDIS.⁴

Obviously, the footage is trimmed for time and pacing reasons, but one obvious result of these trims is to remove every single other cast member aside from William Hartnell. Why complicate people’s memories too much?⁵

And in the spirit of not complicating memories: End of an Era has to cheat again. And this time, the cheat is more intricate than just pasting a well-known theme tune onto the footage, as per Dixon. Because as the video above makes clear: the shot of the TARDIS materialising isn’t in the original episode of “An Unearthly Child” at all! End of an Era had to create it from scratch.

With everything “An Unearthly Child” throws at the screen at this point in the episode, it’s not immediately obvious that what became an iconic⁶ shot isn’t actually present in the original episode. But End of an Era needed the visual shortcut in order to land the joke of Smashie as the Policeman from Zog. So it cheated history, just a little, and faked it.

As for how they faked the shot: it’s deceptively simple. They just took part of the landscape from elsewhere in the picture, and used it to create a version of the shot with the TARDIS painted out. Then they simply mixed between the two images. If you look carefully, you can see that part of the background is duplicated, proving that this was the technique used:

Isn’t television wonderful?

All of which leads us to the final moments on this sequence… and one of my favourite parts of End of an Era full stop. As lauded as the Blue Peter and Beatles sections of the show are, below is when I think you realise the show is something truly special:

The comparison video is instructive here. Rather than trying to patch in the extra “Policeman From Zog” lines to the existing credits, which would be a complete nightmare in terms of matching the old and the new, End of an Era just recreated all the credits from scratch, including the Next Episode caption.⁷

All that effort, just for a joke lasting a few frames, that most people would only ever see once.⁸

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And with that, at least for a while, End of an Era moves away from using big, famous clips, and starts using its archive footage in an entirely different way. In fact, it starts using it like a real documentary.

Join me next time, for our duo’s early days in radio. “Quite literally life on the ocean waves, in a lurchbysmal type way…”

With thanks to Simon Coward, James Cooray Smith and Pip Madeley for archive research, Oliver J. Wake and David Brunt for filling in some of my missing 50s/60s TV knowledge, Darrell Maclaine and Mike Scott for general interesting thoughts, Paul Hayes for some useful feedback on an early draft, and Tanya Jones for being my usual unpaid editor.

1. In fact, only 32 episodes existed at the time End of an Era was made; “Duffy Calls the Tune” from 1959 was only discovered in 2024. ↩

2. Dixon was a live programme at this point, so there was no chance for a retake. ↩

3. Thought experiments like these are why I write long tedious articles about comedy shows, rather than comedy shows. ↩

4. The below video uses an unrestored version of “An Unearthly Child”, rather than the restored version on the DVDs. Mainly because the restored version replaces the original captions with recreated ones, which will become relevant later. ↩

5. Or indeed pay any extra residuals to the rest of the cast, but I think simplifying the sequence is the correct thing artistically, regardless of any other concerns. ↩

6. I know this word is overused to hell, but I believe in this case it is actually appropriate. ↩

7. This was almost certainly done by making a real credit roller, making it the second BBC show in 1994 to utilise such a thing for comedy: the first was The Day Today, and Attitudes Night. “Fancy Lady? Well fancy that.” ↩

8. Incidentally, remember “The Rotten Apple” making an appearance on Lime Grove Day in 1991? Also shown that day: the previously unbroadcast pilot of Doctor Who. This was a different, earlier version of Episode 1 of “An Unearthly Child”, which still features a sequence very much like the one used in End of an Era. Surely at least worthy of a “hmmmm”, if nothing else. ↩

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