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